The only foolproof wine preservation technique would be one that:
A. Does not expose the wine to any additional oxygen.
B. Does not change the ratio of headspace volume to liquid volume.
Coravin satisfies A for the most part, unlike this and other inventions. But it doesn’t satisfy B, and that matters since aromas can be lost even into an inert headspace. I don’t know how you would solve both problems at once but that’s the holy grail.
Happy with first use.
I’ve never tried them, but glass beads seem like they address A and B, and they’re cheap. Probably not enough money to be made off them, which is why no one promotes them.
But you can’t get the glass beads into the bottle without opening the bottle, thereby introducing oxygen. I’m not sure it’s theoretically possible to satisfy A & B perfectly in the context of traditional wine bottles without quantum tunneling.
Alan Rath showed that very little oxygen enters a wine at the surface unless you splash it around. So apart from any oxygen introduced in the bottle when pouring a glass, the threat of oxygen exposure may be overblown.
Yes. I’ve been surprised by how many very mature wines I’ve had over the years that had been poured from the bottle, more than half emptied, then simply stuck a cork back in and tried a day or more later…and were fine. Sometimes better. One time I brought home a case of Cabs, mostly from the '50s-70s. I used good judgment which to consume first over the next several days. Only 2 had significantly dropped off. Some were better.
Of course Cabs aren’t particularly fragile, while some other wines are. Using the half bottle method with vulnerable wines, very carefully funneling into a tilted bottle from a just opened wine, then sparging, corking and refrigerating has yielded several oxidized wines the next day. I think, for next day consumption, those wines would’ve been much better off just left in the original bottle. The oxygen exposure from that very careful transfer is many times what it would get if poured into an unsparged bottle. (Sparging would probably be fine, but not practical.) On the other hand, carefully siphoning into a half bottle (with the tube below the surface of the bottle being transferred into) is minimal exposure. None of the wines I’ve done that with have had a problem.
With a variable volume container, like the Eto or Wine Squirrel, I think they’re probably the best method. It’s scaled down winery tech. Opening it up and pouring out some wine shouldn’t be an issue. Just some wines, which should be fairly obvious, would be best protected when transferred in. Good opportunity for an add-on product.
Popping the cork and dropping in a dozen beads after emptying half the bottle surely qualifies as splashing around. And as I’ve proved to myself many times, I have a hyper-sensitivity to O2 so none of the half-assed methods that work for other people work for me (e.g. the half-bottle trick, etc.) Which is why Coravin was such a godsend, except some wines still lose aromatics due to outgassing into the inert increased headspace.
Are there more people who had the opportunity to test eto ?
Everyone who has one is satisfied ? I’m thinking of buying one.
I use mine a lot. It does a good job upto the 7-10 day mark which is about all the preservation I ever need to do. Very happy and I’m considering a second so I have red+white.
I have yet to try it with more mature wines, mostly those that are less than 8 years old so far.
If you are pouring the entire wine bottle into the Eto, aren’t you oxygenating the entire bottle of wine? Isn’t that the most violent act you can do to a wine, which is pour it into a decanter? If you seal the decanter off air going forward, wouldn’t this still be less ideal than say a Coravin? Or would one trade oxygenating a wine once with no surface area, over no oxygenation with greater surface area? At ~2:30 into the video, there is a fellow who first says the decanted wine tasted as fresh as a freshly opened wine, and then contradicts himself by saying the Eto wine was better because it was more open — but this is also 7 days after the decant – which suggests that oxygenating the wine in the initial decant is relatively harmless.
I snipped a photo from the Kickstarter and they show no oxygenation despite the immediate decant. Anyone know if the “freshly opened wine” of 18% is actually a freshly decanted bottle of wine vs. a sealed bottle of wine that was is uncorked? If it is the former, then there is misleading marketing here because a Coravin wine wouldn’t be decanted. Also, I’d like to see a Repour in this chart.
According to that chart, there is more dissolved oxygen in the wine after using a vacuum pump than there is by just putting the cork back in the bottle. Why would that be?
Well yes, which is why it doesn’t store wines in perpetuity. The amount of oxygenation during the pouring process isn’t that huge if you’re gentle, and being honest, for the purpose of the ETO, it’s totally fine as it’s comparable to a double decant. It’s arguably desirable.
I wonder the same thing - seems counter to wine preservation to pour it all into a special decanter, as nearly all of the liquid surface would have touched air in the process
Just spit balling here… Julian, you are implying above (and please correct me as I don’t want to put words in your mouth) that there is limited oxygen introduced into a wine during a decant, and thus the ETO works by limiting surface area/evaporative contact. But then earlier in the thread, John mentioned another thread that suggested there isn’t that much oxygen introduced via surface contact, the implication being a decant works because of either (i) oxygen introduced into the body of the wine during the decant pour or (ii) perhaps some other evaporative/non-oxygen interaction on the surface area. If it’s the case that there is limited oxygen introduced into a wine during a decant and the beneficial properties of airing out of a wine are some other evaporative/non-oxygen interaction… then (a) why does the Repour work for people at all, and (b) has ETO really cracked the code with the best short-term wine preservation system (however you define it, e.g., 7 days or less?)
Not a scientist so I’m just drawing loose conclusions here.
Really, I think it comes down to time exposed. With ETO, your wine has oxygen contact over a relatively small surface area for a matter of seconds rather than minutes, so any effect of oxidation is limited to what is possible in that short time frame - that’s why I’m implying there is limited oxygen introduced in this type of decant. Afterwards, the wine is stored in something close to a vacuum with a very tight seal (which is the benefit over something like a vacuvin), so any degradation is confined to what’s already there. There’s no need to “take out” oxygen as there’s no airspace - that’s the key difference with something like repour, but I guess that’s obvious.
I certainly don’t think the beneficial properties of airing wine are a result of something other than oxidation. My reference to a double decant is that done quickly and gently, double decants are effective for removing sediment and don’t really change the wine that much. Perhaps think of the ETO as a device that allows a bit of oxygenation during the process of setting up, a desirable amount, and then closing the device up essentially freezes it in time for around 7-10 days, with marginal introductions of oxygen every time you access more wine. That would reflect my experience with it pretty closely.
Anyone else notice in the ETO video, when you push down on the wine, it seems to compress it by 20%? There is that much air in the liquid, and you can just press it out?
That’s the airspace above the bottom of the seal. There’s a decent gap in their and the sealing ball needs to push up, too.
That graph doesn’t quite make sense to me. The simplest interpretation is that they are measuring O2 as a percent of total dissolved gasses. The amount of dissolved free O2 (ignoring oxygen converted into other forms like hydrogen peroxide) at equilibrium should be proportional to the amount present in the headspace above the wine (Henry’s Law), which should be in some sort of equilibrium with the atmosphere outside the bottle (unless oxygen is consumed by chemical reactions in the wine at a faster rate than it can move through a wine cork). Consistent with this, O2 is ~21% in Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, which is similar to the 18% they measured at the start in wine.
If that is what they are measuring, it makes no sense that any of the other preservation methods would result in higher percentages of dissolved O2 a week later (particular injecting argon, which would lower the percentage of O2 in the headspace). So that can’t be what this graph is showing.
Perhaps I’m missing something here, but it is a good example of a graph that can convince people of something when they don’t even know what it is showing!
Is there a winemaker reading this that could comment? Maybe 100% is defined as the % O2 present in normal atmosphere and it is normally lower than that in wine and the headspace due to chemical reactions that have previously consumed oxygen from the head space which has not been replaced because the rate that oxygen permeates the cork is much slower? That might make sense.
