Pungo update: I found a bottle of 2012 Crivelli Ruche stashed in my home cabinet with a Pungo stopper. About 1/4 of the wine remained in the bottle. I had forgotten about the bottle a while ago. CellarTracker tells me that the last time I accessed the bottle was January 27. I pulled the stopper, reinserted the Pungo, and… the wine is still as fresh as the first day I tapped it.
I don’t know how many of you drink Ruche, but this is not a wine that stands up well to oxygen. The Pungo is amazing.
For those of you posting that the Pungo needs to remain in the bottle, no, it does not. The stoppers work exceptionally well, as this demonstrates yet again. I’ve probably held more than 30 bottles for varying lengths of time with the stoppers, and I’ve yet to encounter even slight degradation. My Pungo was pulled from a '94 LdH Tondonia GR tonight to pour the Crivelli. Now the LdH is stored (half full) under stopper, the Crivelli is finished, and the Pungo is currently inserted in a '13 Quintarelli Bianco Secco.
I am less interested in sampling wines in my cellar over long periods of time, so I am not sure that the Coravin serves a need for me. It seems like the Pungo requires you to tip the bottle to pour it, and since I stand my bottles for some days if possible to settle the sediment, and I almost always decant my wines, I am not sure how the Pungo would fit in with decanting. I tried something almost identical to the Wikeeps a few years ago that was from Germany, I think, and it seemed to work pretty well at preserving wine as long as the unit was placed quickly at the initial opening of the bottle. It was a simple and pretty inexpensive system.
More useful to me would be effective means of oreserving leftover wine overnight or at most a couple of days. I am intrigued by an unreleased product from the company that makes Airscape, which is a metal canister that many people use to store coffee beans, and the inner lid has a one way valve, and as you use the beans you push down on the canister lid that travels down the into the canister and evacuates the air through the one way valve. A secondary lid closes over the top of the canister for additional protection. Anyway, they are apparently planning to release a glass wine canister and I am waiting. Again, I know that this is serving a different purpose than either the Coravin or the Pungo.
Yep. I got three stoppers, so I can have up to four bottles going, assuming the pungo is left in the fourth. This is enough to significantly improve my ability to pair a half bottle with dinner, without having that second half go off when we don’t return to it for a week.
I’d think the Coravin would be more convenient if your goal is to sample from dozens of bottles at arbitrary times; but if you want to have a reasonable handful of bottles available at any one time, the Pungo does just fine for this. The extra step of inserting/removing the stopper is a two second operation.
The one time I tried to Pungo an older cork, it ended up pushing the cork in - should’ve seen that coming. I wouldn’t have frequent occasion to Pungo an older wine anyway, between the sediment concerns mentioned above, and that I don’t/can’t generally open 20+ year old wines to pair with Wednesday night’s pasta and then want to save the second half for next Monday.
I had a question about the Pungo. When you pull the device out of the cork, there is a hissing sound. Is this the gas leaving the bottle and if so, what good is the stopper?
Coravin all the way for me, especially now that I am rid of the cartridges. One thing I did learn almost two years ago from a local Somelier is to purge the needle prior to plunging the needle in through the cork. The theory is even a small amount of O2 within the needle will start the oxidation process. I wonder…I have been using it to test special cellared wines and have not found detectable changes. Belief is a wonderful thing, so far!
I have a Pungo, and you can purge the air out of the needle. It’s best to purge it just before and just after inserting it though the cork (it only takes a second to do this, and the cost of the argon for the Pungo is a fraction of the Coravin, so it’s no big deal). The Pungo has a bi-directional needle (the gas going in direction and the separate wine going out direction). Purging before inserting through the cork purges the ‘in direction’, purging just after gets the ‘out direction’.
The hissing you’re hearing after removing the Pungo is the slight bit of pressure in the bottle pushing Argon out. This gives you a few seconds to insert the sealing pin without any air getting in…same idea as a positive pressure room in a hospital.
I think the sealing pin is an advantage for the Pungo (compared to the Coravin, of course) for folks that insert/remove the Pungo/Coravin frequently. The Pungo has a single (large) hole, but it’s sealed each time. The Coravin creates another tiny hole in the cork each time…in theory the elastic properties of the cork will reseal each hole. But with enough punctures, the cork will lose it’s structure and it’ll start allowing more air to get in/out. This isn’t an issue if you’re drinking a bottle over a few weeks…but it will start to be if it’s much longer than that.
Just to add to what has already been mentioned, the hole left in the cork when you remove the Pungo is about .027 in^2 in area. With a 1.5" long cork, the length to diameter ratio is about 50:1, leaving a long thin channel of argon. Even if you let all of the argon escape, it would take tens of minutes for air to diffuse through this channel and enter the bottle in any measurable concentration.
We used to advocate a quick-replace technique when removing the Pungo and inserting a sealing pin, but we’ve found this isn’t really critical. We’ve performed numerous tests where we pull the Pungo out completely, and then wait certain amounts of time (30 seconds / 1 min. / 2 min. / etc) before installing the sealing pin. This was to get an idea on how real world / worst case usage would have an effect. A glass was pulled once a week and the process repeated. After 6 weeks, we saw no degradation on any of them. It would be great to hear others’ experience with this.
I have a coravin, and think it is very good, but I can see value in a Pungo as well - the Coravin is great on a genuine cork, no issues, it re-seals and is the same as not opening the bottle… but give it a fake cork (composite) then one hole and stopper it would work much better, so I could see using a pungo in that environment… however neither handles a screwcap!
Alasdair
Just added my name to the Pungo wait list. I was 50/50 on which direction to go as I’ve only used the Corvin, but after reading all of the comments and watching the videos on Pungo, I’m going in their direction.
Pungo just arrived. Pretty excited to start using it. Only complaint I can see this far is storage of the device when not in use. It doesn’t come with an sort of holster and is oddly shaped. Does anyone with one of these have suggestions? I’m mainly concerned with the needle getting contaminated while not in use.