Despite our best efforts to be careful, spilling food and drink is almost inevitable over the Christmas period. And no such spillage is perhaps more dreaded than that of red wine.
The deep colour of the beverage makes it notoriously difficult to get out of the carpet. While scrubbing it with a cloth sometimes seems to just make it worse.
There are a number of myths out there surrounding the best way to remove red wine from fabrics – how many of us have heard that using white wine works? But one cleaning expert has shared a video to set the record straight once and for all.
Zachary Pozniak, from Jeeves of Belgravia dry cleaners in New York, took to social media to reveal what to do. Speaking to his almost 600,000 followers on TikTok, he said: “I’m going to show you how to get red wine out of the carpet.”
To follow his advice you will need warm water, white vinegar, an iron and a clean towel.
The first step is to mix warm water and white vinegar together and pour this directly onto the stain.
This is then covered by a towel. Zachary said: “First, you’re going to take one part vinegar, three parts warm water.
“Pour that on the stain. Vinegar is going to neutralise it and then we’re going to put a clean towel on top of it.”
Then you need to heat up an iron, and iron over the towel.
“Heat up your iron hottest setting and iron it,” Zachary said.
“Heat is hopefully going to transfer the wine stain from the carpet into your towel.
“You don’t really need to push some steam into it, just let the heat do its thing.
“You may need to repeat this, but you can already see the wine coming up.”
In the video he repeated this three times, using fresh towels, until the stain was mostly gone.
“It looks a little like it’s still there but just wet,” he said.
“If you have any residual redness just put some hydrogen peroxide on the stain.
“This is an oxygenating bleach and it’s going to correct that colour over time.
“It’s a great thing to have in the house as is but honestly, this works pretty well.”
He spread the hydrogen peroxide over the area and left it.
Zachary returned to the carpet the next day to show how the stain had disappeared.
However, in the captions he warned that this combination will not work on certain other stains such as egg and blood.
“Acids are great at removing tannin-based stains like coffee, wine and tea,” he said.
“Heat will only set protein stains like egg, blood, gravy etc as they can become ‘cooked’ with high temperatures.”
