Up on eRobertparker, Coravin demo about the new device that allows single pours of wine, without opening the bottle This is frigging amazing. It will allow drinking a bottle of wine over weeks, months, possibly even years! with degrading the taste of the wine. If it performs as suggested by Parker, this will be a great boon to everyone who loves to drink aged wines. I admit it, even in the jaded world of wine collecting and drinking, this device is the real deal. Pre ordered two units for later this summer. Imagine tasting a wine before pulling a cork to see if there is TCA!!! Amazing
Yes, but imagine the problem this will create for wine counterfeit! Suppose you want to fake that pre-atomic era bottle of Mouton. This device could be used to extract a small sample for testing and voila! No radioactive residue, and the wine is proved at least to be from an earlier era.
I think that the trouble to re-fill empties through a cork will be offset by the ability to sample a bottle, pre-sale, without damaging the rest of the wine. Also creates the option to do chemical analysis of the wine with minimal loss of volume.
Among other things, imagine…
Less overall drinking, as now you don’t need to think of “emptying out the last of the bottle.”
A revival of the cork industry, at least indirectly. This is a device you cannot use with a screwcap. Taste the wine upon release. If there is TCA, the wine can be immediately rejected. Less risk to consumers for an uber expensive bottle of wine, stored lovingly for 20 years, and then discovered to be flawed.
As noted in the video, now many restaurants can open the cellars wide and have EVERYTHING be a wine-by-the-glass program. Don’t want to spend $1,000.00 for that taste of Screagle? No problem, just give me a 3 oz pour at $65 and I’ll be happy.
If this retails at about $200, with $10 for argon replacement cartridges, then I’d gladly spend .50 to pull a glass or two out of a bottle.
A customer of mine is the creator (original name Wine Mosquito). We’ve been testing the device since the early days when it looked like a mosquito, all handles and pokey parts, and love it!
The risk of counterfeit is far outweighed by the opportunities granted by painlessly pulling a sip of an epic wine, d’Yquem came first to mind, without damaging the remaining contents.
In blind taste testing, side-by-side bottles of “Coravin’d” and untouched bottles were virtually identical months later. Definitely getting one for myself!
(no affiliation, no investment, nothing but best hopes for this project as a wine lover)
It is very exciting, but I wonder what it means for the aging of the wine. If you pull a glass and replace all the oxygen with argon, will the wine turn inert or will it continue to age? If the aging curve is not impacted, this is going to be even more fabulous. Want to know if that wine is ready to drink? Draw an ounce or two and see. Watch a wine over its maturity curve with only one bottle!
Even if it is only valuable for mature wines, it will be a fantastic thing. No question I’ll own one.
I hope it works. In the mid-1980s I bought a wine preserver that used argon. It killed the second half of a bottle of 1970 Ch. Latour; after just 24 hours, the wine had no flavor at all. I know that’s not supposed to happen, but…
OTOH, I purchased Wine Saver last summer, which also uses argon, but haven’t deployed it yet. I’ll report when I do.
Coravin LLC, which develops new technology to tap wine, has closed a $11.5 million funding round, raising the amount from 106 investors, according to an SEC filing.
Argon is notably heavier than air, but unless you are storing your bottles cork up, the air passing through the cork should be unaffected. Bottles stored on their sides would probably see no change in the aging curve. All bets are off on bottles that are stored either cork up or cork down or at a significant angle.
I find it odd that Wired rates Private Preserve better than Coravin. I found Private Preserve to be very erratic in how well it preserved wine. Could have been a technique issue, I suppose.
I’m planning on getting one – but I’m a bit concerned that the cartridges run out after 3-4 bottles. Maybe you can stretch that a bit by only preserving half the bottle, then just drinking the last half of the bottle in one sitting. I’d really like to see a setup with a larger argon container and a hose.
you really have to watch the demo video to get the full appreciation for this device. The ability to pull a glass or two from an expensive bottle of wine, then RETURN THE WINE to your cellar for another 2, 3 or 5 years to have again at your leisure is a priceless benefit. Again, if you are concerned about an expensive bottle being potentially contaminated, (or even too tannic to drink now) you can pour a glass and decide for yourself. How much money will that save? Quite a lot I think. Not to mention that the total wine consumption for someone like me will likely decrease as I no longer have to dump 1,2, 3 glasses after a day or two in the fridge. Despite the argon gas displacing the headspace, if you store wine on its’ side there will still likely be micro oxygen ingress through the cork into the wine, despite the argon. This should allow the wine to continue to “age” (whatever that means, as this process is still incompletely understood)
I have used the Wine Preserve pump/spray systems and they tend to taste flat even after using the preservative because you fundamentally have to break the seal of the bottle completely to pour the wine. Ok for a day or two but you certainly could not return the wine to your cellar and expect it to last…
Other than some cost initially, just does not seem to be a downside here of much note. Of course there will still be plenty of inexpensive wines you will drink at one sitting, and Stelvin will be fine for these. But I for one cannot wait to pull a taste from an expensive new bottle, find it TCA contaminated, and return it to a retailer
You are certainly right about how little we know about the reasons wine ages (and that is just mindboggling to me), but I would not be so sanguine that wine will continue to age normally (or anything like). From what I heard on the TWA videos, it seems unlikely – the wines seem to have been stopped in their tracks.
Again, it wouldn;t stop me from buying one, but it would make it much less useful a tool if it essentially halted (or significantly altered) the maturity curve.
Oxygen dissolves rapidly in wine, but diffuses away from the surface layer rather slowly. However, turbulence caused by pouring provides an effective mechanism to quickly mix the oxygen that has been dissolved, allowing more to be dissolved at the surface. So, if you pour out part of the bottle and then perserve with argon or the Private Reserve gas (not all inert gas, btw), the remaining wine may have absorbed a significant amount of oxygen. The amount depends on the details of how you poured the wine, whether you left the bottle out pouring successive glasses throughout a meal before preserving, etc.
Systems like Private Reserve have the problem that it’s difficult to expel all of the air in the remaining head space. The popular notion is that a heavier, inert gas will blanket the wine and keep oxygen away from it. That’s actually not correct. Initially, a heavier gas will flow to the bottom of the head space. But, as it equilibrates, the inert gas and the oxygen will distribute throughout the head space in a nearly constant concentration. In the absence of convection effects, a heavier gas is very slightly more concentrated at the bottom, but the scale length for a noticeable change in the concentration is five to ten kilometers, so the concentration is essentially constant over height of a wine bottle.
One of the other concerns is that partially emptying a bottle causes volatile compounds to come out of the wine. This is most commonly mentioned with respect to the vacuvin system. But, each separate compound that can come out of solution sets up it’s own equilibrium between the amount in the solution and in the head space, independent of the other components in the head space gas. So, it really doesn’t matter whether you evacuate the head space or fill it with argon, the volatiles will still come out of the wine.