Coravin Question: Corked

As anyone had a corked bottle of wine poured through the Coravin system? I am curious how this would actually work.

Yes. It works just any othe bottle you Coravin. Except, the wine is bad.

Wait, what?

+1
The wine picks up the taint from normal contact with the cork. Once that happens it’s all over but the shouting regardless of how the wine comes out of the bottle.

I thought this thread would be about spreading TCA to uncontaminated bottles through a contaminated Coravin.

+1 and it probably is.

I would wonder about contamination of the needle itself and whether or not there are instructions on how to ‘clean’ it - and this would apply to high VA or bretty wines as well . . .

Cheers!

The Coravin system magically removes any visible signs of cork taint by it’s remarkable PATENTED system, thus ensuring hours of pleasure-filled glasses at the touch of a switch! Hard to believe, but modern science is just starting to understand the amazing life processes involved in such a REVOLUTIONARY new tool!

And how much did YOU have to DRINK to come up with such a CREATIVE answer?

The shop I work in has a Wine Emotion dispensing machine and I was told that it was ‘re-engineered’ (from the Enomatic) to improve the manifold system. The problem was cross-contamination between bottles in the unit. As it is, there is a rather extensive process one must go through to clean the individual bottle tubes and the related manifold outlet for each. Cross-contamination via the Argon gas is a whole other thing.

Sounds like this is a very valid question.

I assume a reasonable gas and/or water cleaning of the needle is sufficient. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but TCA isn’t a biological agent like, say, a bacterial contamination where if some minute fraction of one drop of wine from a past bottle that had TCA is going to get into the new bottle and bloom into a bottle-killer.

I’m open to being proven wrong on this, but this sounds like a total non-issue to me. And I say that as someone who is not a partisan on either side of the Coravin topic.

Now, putting the bottle into Joe B’s offsite storage, that’s a whole different thing . . .

Well yes actually. At least based on the one corked bottle I CV’d that was corked. I know weird but when tried again a month later there wasn’t the obvious corkededness. The wine tasted pretty flat granted but it did not taste corked.

There was no impact on subsequent bottles CV’d but I pass water through the needle and pass a little gas through at the end of the day.

While I was not clear about my question, I was curious for an answer like this. I have seen many corked bottles and its appearance has been variable. I would assume that the wine would always eventually show corked when CV’d but more looking for this “muted appearance” of the wine answer. As part of the job, I become very familiar with the typicality of our young wines. Sometimes they show very muted and while not overtly corked, some not even showing any signs with days open, come across very flat whereas subsequent bottles show “bright.”

Since TCA can be caused by a fungi and chlorinated phenolic compounds, I have seen wines be “corked” on the top of the cork, ie once the foil is removed a “corked” smell is released. I have removed capsules and allowed the bottles to sit. While the note doesn’t completely disappear it is reduced and does not show up on the wine once the cork is pulled. Now say I have a bottle like this and I drive a needle through the cork, it would seem that contamination would occur. Hence having TCA show in the wine when it might not otherwise appeared.

As for the point about cross-contamination of all sorts of agent, this was probably the bigger question I was asking. Though, honestly I was looking for anecdotal views of a more casual nature. Though I would be completely open about this being a more “scientific” question.