Storing Marsala wine.
After seeing a recent post about uses for marsala wine I became concerned about how I have been storing my marsala wine and sherry. I do not treat them like wine at all, they stay in my cabinet with other liquor. Should I keep it in the fridge like other open wines? I'm concerned about the chicken marsala and seafood dishes I have made with the Sherry with wine that had been sitting in my cabinet for several months. No one got sick or complained about an off taste so I hope I am ok, but...
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3 Comments:
You have to work pretty hard to make wine go bad. I mean, think about it, what you've got is fermented grapes. It's months or years old to begin with. It's bottled and sealed to stop the fermentation, but it's still changing in the bottle.
Wine can turn into vinegar, but that's not going to make you sick. And it takes a lot to get it to turn into vinegar. It doesn't do it by itself, it needs the right bacteria to change the alcohol. I looked for months to find that bacteria in a bottle of vinegar and it took quite a while to get a decent colony going to make vinegar on purpose. And the change doesn't happen overnight. And you'd know...you'd see the weirdness growing in your wine.
However, I always store open wine in the fridge, even if it's just going to be used for cooking. Opened wine does change as it sits, and the change happens slower in the fridge.
dbcurrie at 1:15AM on 08/05/09
Both marsala and sherry are fortified wines, eg wines that were traditionally "fortified" with brandy or other distilled spirit as a preservative. Storing your open sherry or madeira in a cabinet for a few months shouldn't make people sick, but you are likely losing some of the flavor profile from the more volatile alcohol esters. There are some wines that go through an oxidation process during aging and while those will mature in bottle, other sherries do not benefit from bottle aging. Once open, you want to use it within the next few months, store in the fridge more to protect the flavor than for any other reason.
wookie at 2:22AM on 08/05/09
Wine goes sour due to oxidation and afterwhile it becames as sour as vinegard. Marsala is not a wine: it is a fortified wine or a liquor wine. the barrels of Marsala are not air tight, as a matter of fact, they have a lid which lets air through. The aging of Marsala is, contrary to wine, an oxidation process: the longer it ossidates, the better it becomes ( generally speaking). Therefore, an open bottle of Marsala, closed with a normal cork, will last forever, out of the fridge. Do not put it in the fridge.
Sweet Marsala, or egg Marsala, is not Marsala, but an idustrial byproduct of rather low quality (even if we also enjoy it).
I apologize for my being drastic, but we've just been indoctrinated at the Marsala Florio Cellars in Marsala- Sicily (http://menuturistico.blogspot.com/2009/04/la-sicilia-diario-di-viaggio.html)
Bye
Alessandra
daniela at 3:57PM on 08/05/09