THE MATTER OF leftover wine might seem to rank fairly low on life's list of troubles – a list, incidentally, that would fill up quite a few decks of Army-issue playing cards. You might well ask whether there is any such thing as leftover wine, since wine that somehow doesn't get drunk at one occasion will almost certainly be polished off at the next, preserved in that interval by a Vacu Vin cork or by just being stuffed back into the refrigerator. And most gatherings of any size tend to include some kind of closer, or wine terminator, one of those human sumps into which the dregs of many a bottle disappear. An indispensable figure.

But let's just suppose you are cleaning up after a dinner party, or a plain old party, and you find the kitchen counter littered with some half- or nearly empty bottles of wine. You can't recork them all because you don't have that many Vacu Vin corks, and the refrigerator is already overloaded. You could consolidate the leavings into a single bottle, but, of course, that would be heresy. You could pour it all down the drain, but that too would be heresy, and wasteful, and unnecessary. You could just drink it all yourself, but you've already had too much to drink.

Your only honorable alternative, really, is to make vinegar. A friend of mine with a rather vast wine cellar has taken this fragrant tack; one side of his garage is lined with bottles in racks, while on a table opposite sits a big, nonreactive, opaque vat into which orphaned dribbles and splashes of cabernet sauvignon and merlot have been finding their way for some months.

The fumes are, shall we say, pungent, though not unpleasant, since sourness is an essential element of flavor, not to mention personality. The process itself is a bit like making crème fraîche, requiring only a starter (bacterial) culture, raw material to be cultured (dairy for crème fraîche, old wine – or indeed anything with sugar or starch – for vinegar), a bit of heat, and patience (a day or two for crème fraîche, several months for vinegar).

As a person utterly lacking in patience, I must disqualify myself as a vinegar, or even crème fraîche, maker (my true role is as human wine sump), while noting that the penultimate ingredient – heat – makes winter a slow time for the vinegar maker, particularly if winter contrives to last into May, as this one is doing. Still, your winter vinegar is a mellow vinegar, if the sample I was given the other day is any indication. It might just be, in some situations, the ideal Mother's Day gift.