Even with rigorous precautions to minimize adventitious moisture or proton sources, vinyl alcohol can only be stored for minutes to hours before it isomerizes to acetaldehyde.

(Carbonic acid is another example of a substance that is stable when rigorously pure, but decomposes rapidly due to catalysis by trace moisture.)

Deuterium stabilization can be accomplished through hydrolysis of a ketene precursor in the presence of a slight stoichiometric excess of heavy water (D2O).

Studies show that the tautomerization process is significantly inhibited at ambient temperatures ( kt ≈ 10−6 M/s), and the half-life of the enol form can easily be increased to t1/2 = 42 minutes for first-order hydrolysis kinetics.

[12] The vinyl alcohol to acetaldehyde rearrangement is the only keto-enol tautomerisation to have been detected in deep space, induced by the provision of secondary electrons from galactic cosmic rays.