The Amazing Uses for Italian Wine (Beyond Drinking It)

We know what you’re thinking…

“Why would I want to use my Italian wine for anything other than drinking it? I love drinking my wine!”

And we do too, believe us. But the fact is that the bottle of wine you have hiding away in the cupboard or fridge is more versatile than you might think. In fact, it may have a lot of uses that you’d never ever thought of. And each one can either help you to solve a problem or make something in your life better.

Feeling curious now?

These are the things that you can use Italian wine for other than drinking the stuff.

Cooking

Let’s start with the obvious one!

There are a huge number of recipes that use Italian wine as part of the cooking process. Often, the wine is used as part of creating a sauce that gets poured over the dish. At other times, the wine may be essentially defused into a meat or other ingredients to give them a completely different flavour.

Either way, the wine makes a big difference to the dish. And the best thing is that you can get away with using fairly cheap wines whenever you’re cooking!

But here’s another way that wine can help when cooking that you might not know about. 

The high alcohol content of wine makes it ideal for cleaning fruits and vegetables. In fact, an Oregon State University study shows that white wine can destroy some of the bacterial nasties that can get into your food, such as E.Coli and Salmonella. So the next time you’re running your ingredients under the tap, consider giving them a dip in a bowl of wine. You may just find that the wine cleans the ingredients even better than water, as well as adding an interesting taste.

Removing Stains

Now this one definitely doesn’t make sense, right?

You’ve spilled red wine on your floor before. And after bemoaning the loss of your precious wine you got really upset at just how tough the stain is to remove. Red wine stains are so notorious that a ton of cleaning products use it as the go-to example of a tough stain that’s almost impossible to remove.

But before you rush out to buy the latest cleaning products, cast a glance towards the white wine in your fridge.

As strange as it may seem, white wine may be the perfect stain remover for red wine. The white wine actually absorbs a lot of the colour out of the stain, which makes it easier to clean later on.

But here’s a really important thing to remember…

This doesn’t work in reverse!

If you spill a white wine, do not pour a red onto it. You’ll only make things worse. Thankfully, white wine stains are a lot easier to remove than red ones.

Trapping Fruit Flies

Summer’s here and you have every window in the house open. You’re enjoying that nice cool breeze until you hear a familiar sound.

Buzzzzzz.

You try to rush to the window to shut the critter out but it’s too late. There’s a massive fruit fly hovering around your living room. And you just know that the annoying little thing isn’t going to figure out how to go back the way it came. As you watch it senselessly fly into the window over and over again, you wonder how God could have made a creature that’s so unbelievably stupid.

Now, it’s time to get rid of it.

You could chase the fly around with a swatter but that’s a fool’s game. As stupid as the fly may be, it’s fast enough to make you look just as stupid as you chase it around the house.

You could use a fly spray. But that means pumping chemicals into the air, which isn’t ideal for you. After all, you don’t want to breathe in the chemicals that kill flies, do you.

Okay…you need another idea.

And that’s where your opened bottle of wine comes into play.

Pour a little bit into a bowl or mug and place it on the side. The fermented fragrance of the wine will attract the fly and it’ll eventually drown itself in the wine.

We know the feeling little fly. We can’t resist Italian wine either!

Fertilising Magic

You’ve spent ages filling up the compost bin with mulch. You’re waiting patiently for everything you’ve put in the bin to actually become something that you can use to fertilise your plants.

But it just isn’t happening.

You want to get to gardening but your fertiliser isn’t quite ready for you yet.

Why not encourage it with a little bit of Italian red wine?

There’s something in red wine that activates a specific type of bacteria in decomposing plant matter. Simply put, this bacteria speeds up the process, which means you turn your trash into an amazing fertiliser that will work wonders in your garden.

We’ve heard of people using Italian wine to motivate themselves but we didn’t know those motivational powers extended to bacteria and plants. But perhaps it makes sense. After all, Italian wine is a product of a plant. We suppose it makes sense that it would do something special for other plants as well.

The Final Word

Those are just four of the things that you could use your Italian wine for other than drinking.

And the best thing is that there are even more uses for that bottle of wine than those we’ve listed here. We’ve spoken before about how amazing wine is for your skin. In fact, there are entire spas dedicated to using it to help people with all sorts of skin ailments!

We haven’t even gotten into what you can use the bottles and corks for when the wine’s all gone.

Of course, you need to get your hands on some wine before you can use it for anything. That’s where we can help you. Check out our catalogue and we’re sure you’ll find a wine or two to suit whatever purpose you have in mind.