The Facts

Red wine (all varieties) and carpets (all types) don’t go together too well. If you or your guests have had a little too much wine there are two things certain – one, you throw a nice bash and people are enjoying themselves, and two – at least some wine will end up on your carpet. Red wine is derived from black or red grapes. As with most other organic substances of colour, wine too contains strong natural pigments which love to stain anything and everything they come in contact with, yes including the carpet. Red wine spillage on a light coloured carpet might seem like a crime scene, but in reality the situation is far less shocking that it appears. This however doesn’t mean you have to adopt a carefree attitude towards the spill and forget about it, no, act fast and act firm. Timely measures are the only certain way to banish red wine spills from your carpet and get on with entertaining.

Store-purchased carpet cleaning products including shampoos generally tend to work well in removing red wine stains, as long as you read the label and use the product as instructed. There are also a designated group of specially formulated red wine stain removers so if you got one of those handy, by all means through in the battle. Now if you have been caught completely off guard and no specialised cleaning products are available at that time, there are ways to get around it.

The Cure

Get organised and deal with the stain as soon as possible. This might mean taking you away from the guests for a few minutes but in this case means will justify the end result. Get your hands on a clean cloth and begin blotting out the wine gently. Don’t press hard as this will drive the stain deeper into the carpet, but delicately blot away for a few minutes. Rubbing at the stain is also out of the question. If you try and keep a lifting motion in combination with your blotting efforts, chances are you will do a fine job and won’t drive the stain deeper.

Once you got the worst of the wine stain out of the carpet, follow up with application of a formulated stain remover, that’s provided you have one such product on standby. If you don’t, then move on to homemade yet proven remedies. Now the following option may seem totally counter-common sense but when you think about there is some twisted logic in it – you can douse red wine stain with white wine, yes you read write – white wine helps dilute and dissolve much of the pigment in red wine. This can be used as an excellent pre-treatment method to help you get rid of the red stuff in full. In case your white wine stash is too precious to spill around, opt for carbonated water instead. Carbonation works well to remove pigment from carpet fibres. Be generous when pouring fizzy water but not too generous as you will have to do a lot of drying later on. There is also another way to remove the wine – cover the stain with salt, normal table salt work fine. Cover the entire stain, and put an extra layer of salt on top for good measure. Salt will soak and retain most of the wine. Vacuum thoroughly and repeat if necessary.