Does anyone have experience with keeping wine after using Coravin? Could it last for years?
Lots of threads on this, so maybe try using search.
I had dinner with a collector at his home a few weeks ago, and I have dined and drank from his cellar several times before, with great enjoyment.
This last time however, ALL the wines were flat or flawed or whatever, and I asked him if he had moved or changed the cooling or conditions in his cellar, and he said no, but that he had coravined all of the ones we were drinking that evening in the weeks before the dinner.
Needless to say, he won’t be doing that again, at least not in that way.
There’s no question that Coravin does not work as advertised. Anything beyond about 2-3 weeks is a crapshoot. Not every bottle will be damaged beyond that, but a large percentage will, and even “intact” bottles will have lost something in the way of aromatics.
We tried to make it work but never got beyond 2 weeks. Can make it 1 week with simple vacuum pump so the extra expense is not worth it for me. I have had a few coravined wines from other people that had made it 3 months, no longer.
Slight thread drift:
A fair number of restaurants have Coravin (or equivalent) programs in which they offer higher-end wines at by-the-glass prices in the $35-$100 range, on the presumption that they can sell a single glass whenever and the rest of the bottle still commands the same b-t-g price.
Have others tried wines under these programs? Does experience with degradation of Coravin-accessed wines give you pause in doing so? Should this type of service be available as part of a responsible high-end wine program, or is the technology too young at this point? Is it reasonable to ask the restaurant when they took the first pour from the bottle (and/or should restaurants be discarding after some fixed period, just as they would with any other b-t-g bottle)?
– Matt
I believe Canlis does this for their higher tier pairings, and they were pouring Cayuse and Mas de Boislauzon Cuvee du Quet and both showed impeccably, but not sure if I got the first glasses or what though.
I’ve had mixed results leaving something aside after Coravin and determined that if I leave the bottle upright for a week or so afterwards it takes better to recellaring than if I just drop it back into the shelf, but anecdotes aren’t exactly data so ymmv.
I think it depends on the cork. On one hand, I’ve had bottles that were degraded after a few days . . . but many others–the majority-- that were unchanged after 2-3 weeks. Even had one bottle–2002 Dominique Laurent Vaucrains–that seemed totally unchanged after a year. So, yea, a bit of a crapshoot. I generally don’t go longer than a month, and have had good results.
Not as long as one would think. You can pick up textural and aromatic differences even after 24 hours. I would love to see a study done here.
Based on my personal experience with about 1/3 of aged/mature Coravined wines losing it by 4 weeks, I would not buy a glass of high-end wine from a restaurant using a Coravin. I rarely use mine any more.
Yikes!
Jason
This is one of the really sad things about Coravin. So many restaurants started doing this with so many different wines. There are definitely a LOT of ruined bottles out there, some of them still being offered BTG at very high prices. I’ve talked to some people who started off thinking this could work and learned to stop doing it. If Coravin actually worked as advertised, this would be a fantastic use of it. Instead, there are restaurants who put out huge BTG lists and have now accessed way too many bottles that have already degraded.
I love my Coravin.
I find in general results highly depend upon the cork condition, the storage method after the coravin, and the type wine.
Generally speaking, big reds that are 10 years or older last well over a year in my experience. The key being after serving to store the bottle back into a cool cellar on its side (duh!) It seems many restaurants and wine freinds using a coravin stand the bottles up at room temp! This matters!
I have also tried it on very old Bordeaux back to the 1940’s and here it does not work as well. I find when the corks are old, dry, and or brittle, the wines don’t keep as well, although even here there are exceptions.
Delicate whites I find need to be placed in a cold refrigerator the side and can last six months easy with very little if any detectable traces of advanced oxygenation. However, placing these wines in a regular cellar becomes a crap shoot.
I am going to try a few more formal experiments blind with a group of experienced tasters and track the results at three month intervals over the next year and will report back. I’m thinking I will have the group both rate the wines numerically and with comments blind and served in random order with a control bottle served each time. The control bottle will be a never opened wine from the same case and hope for little bottle variation in the case. I will serve 3 different whites and three different reds all about 10-15 years old. What would you do to differently to test the coravin results?
What ever happened with the Pungo? And have there been enough used to compare with Coravin?
I still use only my own Argon injection and re-cork. My expectations are not more than a few days and my palate is not that critical. But I DO get some customers who buy high end and ask about preservation methods. I’d assume Coravin is good for short-term, though I’m not sure it’s worth the price for just that.
I frequently go a month or longer without any noticeable difference. My sample size isn’t huge (maybe ~25 bottles), but I haven’t ever had a problem with a Coravined bottle. FWIW, I’ve always shot a little bit of the argon gas through the needle just before accessing to minimize potential oxygen exposure.
Pungo rocks. Very happy w it. But I use it differently from Coravin. I drink the wine over the next few weeks w the Pungo still attached, i.e. one bottle and not flitting from b to b.
Great idea. I’d love to hear the results, and I’m sure others would, too.
Same here as Alan with the Pungo, although I do go bottle to bottle sometimes. I tend towards drinking them with in two weeks of the initial Pungo (that a verb?) and have had no degredation.
I’ve ordered glasses from a few restaurants that use a Coravin. What I’ve noticed is that the ones that care about wine (my judgement inserted here) have someone that is smelling and tasting the wine before serving the glass. One place where the Somm smelled the wine…immediately went back and snagged a new bottle.