Tips for Removing Wine Stains From Your Clothes

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You’re having a great evening with your friends. The music’s playing and you’re all catching up on what’s happened in your lives over the past few months.

Then it happens.

You’ve been ideally sipping at your glass of Italian wine all night. It’s almost become an extension of your hand. But that means that you don’t notice when one of your friends gets a little bit too close.

You bump into one another.

That Italian wine that you’d been so lovingly sipping is not all over your top.

And it’s so difficult to get out.

It’s the nightmare situation for any wine lover. All you can do is hope that the clothes aren’t especially valuable. If they are then they’re ruined, right?

Well, not exactly. You see, there are several things that you can do to remove Italian wine stains from your clothes. Just follow these steps to return your clothes back to new so that you can forget that the spill ever happened.

Step #1 – Act Fast

You may feel the temptation to leave the stain until tomorrow. You head away from the party for the moment to grab a change of clothes. The stained item goes into the laundry basket.

And then it stays there, possibly for a couple of days, before you finally get around to washing it.

By that point, it’s usually too late. You’ve ended up giving the wine loads of time to bed into your clothes. You may find it impossible to get rid of it at this point.

So the first tip is simple. Act as quickly as possible in the wake of the spill. This isn’t a job that you can just leave until tomorrow.

Step #2 – Protect Anything That’s Underneath

Wine will soak through your clothes, which means it has the potential to stain anything that’s underneath.

If that’s just your skin then you don’t need to worry.

But if you’re wearing something underneath the clothes that the spill hit, you need to do something about it.

The quickest solution is to take off the affected item so that the stain doesn’t soak through.

But if you can’t do that, for whatever reason, you can pop a paper towel under the stain instead. The towel will now soak up any wine that penetrates the material of your clothes.

Step #3 – Soak it Up

Now that you’ve protected the rest of your clothes, it’s time to deal with the stain.

Your first step is always to soak up as much of the liquid as possible. Use paper towels or napkins, which you should press lightly against the stain.

Do not rub the stain with the towels. This will cause more of the wine to soak into the fabric and may also make the stain larger. Just press until no more wine soaks into the towel.

Step #4 – Keep the Stain Moist

Allowing the stain to dry after dabbing can lead to it bedding in. That means you’ve got to find a way to keep it moist.

Here’s where you might make a big mistake. Using warm water seems like the natural solution here. But it doesn’t work. Warm water will actually work with the stain, allowing it to bed deeper into your clothes.

Instead, you want to use cold water or soda water. Both will keep the stain moist without allowing it to get deeper into your clothes.

Some will also tell you that you can use Italian white wine when cleaning an Italian red wine stain. We think that it’s safer to go with water, but you can try it if you want to take the risk.

Step #5 – Use Salt to Soak Up More of the Wine

Grab a salt shaker and pour some of the salt into your hand. While the stain’s still moist, cover it with salt.

Use your paper towels to press the salt against the stain. You should see that the salt starts to absorb a lot of the wine straight away. When you think it’s absorbed as much as possible, use your cold/soda water to wash the salt crystals away.

Examine the stain again. If it’s still fairly heavy, repeat steps 3, 4, and 5. You’re looking to soak up as much of the stain as possible before you take any more steps.

Step #6 – Pre-Treat the Stain

When you’ve blotted out and lifted as much of the stain as possible, it’s time to launder your clothes.

Instead of throwing them straight into the washing machine, pre-treat them with a stain remover first. Follow the instructions on the stain removers label to ensure you don’t mess this up.

You can also create a paste using water and baking soda to pre-treat the stain.

Step #7 – Launder the Clothes

Now, you can wash the clothes as you normally would. Make sure that you follow the instructions for washing the fabric.

On a general level, you still need to avoid using hot water when laundering. The stain is still an issue and using hot water could cause it to set. You don’t want that, even if the stain will be more faded than it would otherwise have been.

Set your washing machine to 30 degrees Celsius and use a quality laundry detergent.

Step #8 – Don’t Iron or Tumble Dry

Instead, hang the clothes up and examine them for any remnants of the stain.

If you can still see traces of the stain, you should follow the steps again. It’s likely that you’ll just be able to pre-treat and launder again.

You want to avoid ironing and tumble drying until you remove the stain for the same reason that you avoid using hot water. Heat may cause the stain to set, which makes it practically impossible to remove.