1 Gallon Bottles

Well personally I wouldn't do it but perhaps 3 days maximum -- but as the air space above the wine increases then so does the deterioration of the wine. Have you ever tried to drink the remnants of a glass of wine left out from the night before! Ugh ----- warm , flat and disgusting. I would suggest that if you want to breach a one gallon bottle without all the fuss of corking and labelling then have 6 empty wine bottles and six of those little plastic caps that you get with some inexpensive wines --- you can also buy them from you local Home brew shop. If the bottles are clean, even without sanitisation, the wine will keep for a couple of weeks or even more. HTH ( Oh -- 6 bottles from a 1 gal imp)

And keep in mind when you are pouring, the headspace is irrelevant because the surface area grows larger. Visualize pouring from a bottle or jug when it is turned 90 degrees. The surface area is now the length of the bottle, not the top of it.

Look around for some old six ounce (single serving) soda bottles. My wine deserves that level of quality control, minimum. :-)

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Good suggestions above concerning rebottling when you want some. Here are some additional suggestions however.

1) If you are using 1 gal carboy type bottles, use rubber bungs not use cork. A real wine bottle is designed to have considerable cork to bottle contact to keep air out. You will never get this with a jug type bottle. The rubber bung will give adequate seal and will allow the bottles to be stored standing up.

I picked up one of those pumps a few years ago. We're down to two of the grey caps, but it does work surprisingly well.

Of course, these day we rarely have any left ( since she was last pregnant . . . ), and we rarely open a second bottle, so . . .

hawk, running away as he points out that refridgeration can also "solve" the problem