Most of us mere mortals would be hard-pressed to make water out of wine. But vinegar? Anyone can swing that—all you need to do is subject a bottle to suboptimal storage conditions for a long enough time. Chances are, you’re already familiar with the limitations of lower-proof alcoholic beverages like wine and beer: Most properly stored six-packs have a shelf life of maybe a year before they begin to skunk (though plenty of people prefer to drink them fresher), and even a fine red wine that’s intended to age for decades will eventually sour or fade. But does that make them downright dangerous? And where does the vast world of fortified wines, liqueurs, and spirits fit in?
The good news, according to Andrew L. Waterhouse, PhD, UC Davis Professor Emeritus of Enology and author of Understanding Wine Chemistry, is that “across the board, there are really no safety issues [with alcoholic beverages]...in fact, they’re safer from a microbial perspective than drinking water.” Assuming you’re drinking from a bottle that’s labeled and hasn’t had any new ingredients introduced, you run virtually no risk of poisoning yourself with a sip—which is why you won’t find an expiration date on, say, a bottle of vodka. Instead, the question of whether alcohol “goes bad” really boils down to a matter of taste. We spoke to beverage scientists and co*cktail industry pros to get a better understanding of how light, air, microbes, and time affect our favorite bar cart staples, and how to extend their shelf lives for as long a period of time as possible.
The quick and easy answer is that you should store all unopened alcoholic drinks in a cool, dark place. Open bottles with an alcohol content above 30% are quite shelf-stable and can stay put indefinitely, but they’ll start to undergo qualitative changes as the years progress, often becoming harsher with a more pronounced burn. Their under-20% brethren, on the other hand, which include all wines and most fortified wines like vermouth, are best off stored in the fridge and consumed within a range of days to several months, depending on their composition. But nuances and exceptions to these rules abound, and that 20–30% range comes with its own set of considerations, so whether you’re rummaging through your great aunt’s long-forgotten liquor cabinet or doing a little spring cleaning of your own, read on to learn how to draw the line between “rare and refined keepsake” and “toilet-worthy swill.”
Does alcohol expire?
To answer the question and understand how a bottle of alcohol degrades over its lifespan, it helps to know a bit about how it’s made. All alcoholic beverages are produced through fermentation, the core chemical process by which live yeast consume the sugars found in ingredients like fruit, grains, or tubers and convert them into ethanol and carbon dioxide. However, “because high concentrations of alcohol are toxic to all living things, including the yeasts that produce it, brewing yeasts can’t tolerate more than about 20% alcohol,” writes Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, adding that the only way to create higher-proof beverages is by “physically concentrating the alcohol in fermented liquids.”
For this reason, we tend to organize alcoholic beverages into two broad categories: fermented beverages—wine and beer, yes, but also hard cider, sake, and mead—and spirits, which are produced when fermented beverages are distilled into higher-proof versions of themselves. Distillation is made possible by alcohol’s boiling point, which is lower than that of water, allowing manufacturers to follow a process of evaporative heating and siphoning of more ethanol-dense vapor. While any fermented beverage can technically undergo distillation, the distilled spirits you’re likely familiar with are classic liquors, or base alcohols: Think your standard bottle of whiskey, gin, brandy, tequila, vodka, rum, mezcal, shochu, soju, baiju, and the like—all of which usually clock in at closer to 30–50% alcohol by volume (ABV). Sweeten and flavor these high alcohol content spirits and you wind up with liqueurs and cordials like Chartreuse, Kahlúa, and many of Italy’s myriad amari; mix them with aromatized wine and you get fortified wines like vermouth, port, madeira, and sherry.
The range of possible permutations and combinations of ingredients and base spirits is expansive, if not endless, so when we’re thinking about the shelf life of a bottle, it’s actually easiest to generalize first and foremost by ABV.
