Folks always said that Coravined wines were “the bomb”.
What Jens said. Whether or not it is faulty bottles, under normal conditions, the bottles would not be expected to explode. Who manufactured bottles for still wine to withstand additional pressure once they were sealed? Can’t see how the bottle manufacturer would be liable if someone uses the bottles in a way totally unforseen when the bottles were made.
Moroever, there is no way to account for handling after the bottles left the mfg. Coravin owns this one.
Aren’t bottles easily able to withstand 6-8 bars of pressure, minimum? How could the Coravin system inject more pressure than that?
Sounds to me like the famous McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit…someone sued because their hot coffee was hot.
Fwiw, I have been informed that the sleeve is in all likelihood an interim step to meet the very pressing safety need. I believe they are working on another way to address the problem that makes more sense. Stay tuned.
6-8 bar? Why should they? Your car tires are on 2-2.4 bar so why should a still wine bottle withstand 3-4 times this pressure?
I’m assuming Champagne bottles are made with the same general standards as wine bottles, and they are obviously designed to withstand those pressures, constantly. While the stopper is NOT designed for that pressure, the issue at hand is bottles exploding, which makes little sense to me - wouldn’t the cork pop out first? MUST be faulty glass.
Todd, do your fact checking. That’s not why McDonald’s was sued. Don’t want to engage in thread drift, but the facts do matter.
The Coravin Condom - You can’t do it without your fez on!
You can’t run the logic backwards like that - where does the 1:78,000 figure come from? Unless its empirical, you can only estimate the numbers… 
According to the web, that is why they were sued - because scalding hot coffee caused injury to a woman in the drive thru line, and they wouldn’t settle with her. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald’s_Restaurants
Is the additional pressure exerted by the Coravin more than the difference between the pressure at the altitude where the wine is bottled and all the reasonable places (ski cabin at 12k’ yes, Mt. Everest, no) where the wine will be transmitted, stored and consumed? IOW a bottle has to be able to withstand the pressure differences between the atmospheric pressure at which it was bottled and all the reasonable places it is likely to be consumed, and unless the additional pressure exerted by the Coravin is greater than that pressure differential the Coravin shouldn’t be the problem.
Yup, right up until the bottles were Coravin’d, they were evidently working perfectly.
Sorry to see this happen.
Champagne bottles are significantly thicker than your average wine bottle. As far as how they are produced, I imagine they use the same manufacturing techniques, but I have only seen a glass factory 1 time.
With that said, I would expect a normal wine bottle to be able to withstand the pressure of a Coravin, if it is properly manufactured.
Sorry, Todd, but to my mind your statement that “someone sued because their hot coffee was hot” trivializes the true facts. It goes much, much deeper than them being sued because the “coffee was hot.” I do believe there are some cases which are frivolous, and there are also defendants who put up frivolous defenses. The McDonald’s case was not a frivolous claim (as long as the true facts are acknowledged), but I have to give the insurance industry credit for doing a masterful job with the PR machine. Anyway, sorry, thread drift. Back to your favorite channel.
I think Coravin has at least done a good job of jumping on this and addressing it head on. It will be interesting to see where it goes. Sounds like the customers who reported the issues have been pretty good about it. Hope the lacerations weren’t too serious.
Makes sense to me, it removes any danger to the user.
Seven bottles out of probably tens of thousands that have been opened seems like a pretty low risk if all you’re risking is the wine rather than the chance of injury.
I’ve seen wine in these “eco-glass”(and similar) bottles. They use 25% less glass, and thus are thinner. You might expect that these would withstand less added pressure than a run-of-the-mill, thicker bottle.
http://eco-glass.org/home.html
That said, it is difficult to disagree with Jens and others… still wine bottles are not made to be pressurized. Sparkling wine bottles are: that is why they have thicker walls. It is absurd to assert that a still wine bottle that explodes under added internal pressure is “faulty.”
Because coravin said so? Come on. The problem isn’t the bottles, it’s the coravin. The bottles don’t break until another factor is introduced, that’s the coravin. The bottles wouldn’t explode on their own accord even if they are “flawed” (which in itself is lacking in detail).
Not all glass bottles are of the same quality and strength, but that’s something that should have been taken into consideration in regards to pressure buildup caused by the coravin.
I personally don’t do products liability but this looks like a classic law suit waiting to happen if they don’t put out a real fix beyond a sleeve.
Even “regular” still wine bottles can have failures under normal (non-pressurized) circumstances. It’s not very often, but it does happen.
The problem with a Coravin is that the CONSEQUENCES of a bottle failure (whether the bottle itself had a chip or defect) could be much more severe. Put another way, it is reasonably foreseeable that some bottles might explode using the Coravin system? The answer appears to be yes. If so, then Coravin has a problem. Whether this temporary solution is the best one is another matter altogether.
Bruce
I just hope this doesn’t somehow morph into higher demand for those damn heavy bottles that won’t fit in my racking!
Yes, sounds like Coravin was saying we’ve had 7 reports and sold enough capsules for more than 500,000 bottles. If that’s the case, 2 dubious assumptions- all have been used, and that everyone who broke a bottle reported to Coravin. I guess Coravin can clarify if they came up with ratio differently.