However hard you try, it's going to happen to you one day. Your hand slips, your sleeve flicks or you stumble backwards, and you send a whole glass of red wine flying all over the clean pale carpet. You could follow the extreme neat freak example and allow only white food and drink in your life. But if you don't want to follow a white wine diet, there are a few approaches you can take.
Clean Up Red Wine Stains with Salt
Before a big party, or maybe just a Thursday night, it's worth having the biggest pack you can find of cheap table salt. The smaller the crystals, the better. Expensive rock salt, or coarse sea salt, is not only a waste of money, but is much less effective.
You need to cover the stain immediately, and certainly whilst it's still wet, with a lot of salt. Keep covering the stain until you can only see white salt. If the salt is still pink, it's still absorbing it, so you'll need to pour more on, until you have what seems like a ridiculous amount of salt. After a couple of minutes, even this will have turned pink again. Keep going. This takes patience.
When the salt is dry, hoover it up. In the meantime, you'll need to make sure no one treads salt all over the place. Also, given the amount of salt you need, this can be fairly ineffective for big spills. Here, you're better with the soda water approach.
Use Soda Water to Remove Red Wine Stains
More important even than salt, make sure you have bottles of soda water around the house. Keep it fizzy, and keep it away from the stuff you're drinking, in case you run out.
Covered the stain liberally with the soda water. Let it fizz and soak in for a few seconds, then gently soak up with kitchen roll or teatowels - the latter is more environmentally friendly, of course, but you'll need a lot. The soda water acts as a carrier for the red wine. Repeat until what you're soaking up is clear, not pink.
Again, this takes patience, but once it's dried, you won't even be able to tell where you spilt it.
The great thing about the soda water approach is that it still works with older stains too.
Can You Clean a Wine Spill with White Wine?
Don't do this. You've already wasted wine by spilling it on the carpet. Why waste more?
Lizzie Cass-Maran - Lizzie Cass-Maran is a freelance copywriter and copyeditor. Specialist subjects include the comedy industry, particularly in Scotland - ...
Join the Conversation