How Saving Your Wine Corks Can Help Eliminate Kitchen Smells

Say you've bought a rich, fruity petit verdot or a spicy, smoky carménère from your trusted local wine shop after your friends called, telling you they'd stop over later. Then, after opening the bottle and sniffing the cork to get a sense of the wine's aromatic profile, you leave the cork on your kitchen counter and completely forget about it. Maybe you even toss it straight in the trash, assuming it has served its purpose.

However, wine corks can be far more useful than most people realize. While wine corks can stylishly protect your kitchen countertops and even your fingers from hot pot lids, their ability to absorb odors is often overlooked. This means they can be a surprisingly effective alternative to chemical air fresheners when it comes to eliminating lingering kitchen smells. However, this only works with natural cork, not synthetic or plastic kinds.

Natural cork is harvested every nine years from the bark of the cork oak tree (Quercus suber). The bark is boiled, cleaned, and shaped into stoppers, which keep wine safe by minimizing oxygen contact and trapping moisture and smells. This odor-absorbing trait is mainly the result of the bark's microscopic pores, which act as tiny sponges and capture particles from the surrounding environment while naturally protecting the tree from disease and pollutants. That's precisely why keeping a single wine cork in your kitchen can improve the air and save you from wasting money on pricey store-bought fresheners.

All things considered, don't throw away old wine corks. Make them useful in your kitchen and reduce everyday smells instead. The fridge, for instance, is particularly prone to odors, even when kept at its optimal temperature range of 35 to 38 degrees Fahrenheit. These smells are often caused by spoiled food, hidden bacteria, mold, or even improperly stored items. However, this means, even though wine corks can help reduce odors, using them doesn't automatically give you a pass when it comes to cleaning your kitchen.

One crucial step you should never skip is increasing the cork's surface area so it can absorb smells more effectively, especially when it's the only one you have. To do this, just cut the cork in half. Make sure it's completely dry and clean before using it, and put it in any area of your kitchen where smells build up. Feel free to leave them there for up to three days before replacing them with new ones. Finally, you can add a drop of your preferred essential oil, such as lavender, lemon, eucalyptus, peppermint, or rosemary, to boost the space's freshness as the cork does the work.