In my mind, this puts my earlier doubts about Coravin’s efficacy to rest. I suspect my past experiences with wines changing over time were due to slow leakage through the cork puncture. Sealing the hole with a touch of beeswax seems to have solved that.
Tonight’s bottle, revisited nine months after the initial Coravin pour, was fresh as a daisy, with no perceptible difference from my first experience.
It’s a generous expression of Nerello Mascalese, showing smoky strawberries and other red fruits, with subtle spice and herbal notes that keep it engaging. It still feels youthful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a decade or more left in the tank.
To me, this is a nice testament both to Coravin’s effectiveness and to Kevin Harvey’s foray onto Mt. Etna. I resealed the puncture with the original wax I’d applied last April, using a lighter to melt it again, so this little experiment can carry on a while longer.
Great report, Warren. @Steve_McL turned me into a coravin user and I use mine now more than I ever imagined I would.
Have never gone more than a week on Coravin, but your experience certainly opens up a discussion to push it further. Thanks.
Great to hear - but also a cautionary tale. So much depends upon the specific bottle wrt whether you can achieve these same results - variety, vintage, winemaking, etc
I’d be really curious for someone to do a study on whether there are certain structural components of wines that make them better or worse at holding up to being coravin-ed. There seems to be such discrepancy between different wines that something must be going on relative to the specific conditions of that preservation method.
I agree completely. There are plenty of variables that determine whether a particular bottle will hold up after being Coravined. I don’t actually use mine very often. When I do, it’s usually for younger, bolder reds that aren’t throwing sediment, or for whites that I expect to finish within a reasonable window anyway.
This bottle was less a planned test and more an accidental experiment. I’d simply forgotten about it. It was sitting in my upstairs rack where I keep a half dozen bottles for near term drinking. That rack isn’t climate controlled, and since we mostly drink champagne from the cellar downstairs, those upstairs bottles can sit longer than intended. When I reached for a red to go with last night’s beef stew, I noticed it wasn’t full and remembered I’d pulled a glass from it many months ago.
I agree with your point that Coravin won’t behave the same way across all wines. Variety, age, structure, cork condition, winemaking all play a role… I’ve found it useful in a narrow lane, but certainly not a universal solution.
There are simply so many variables when it comes to Wine that it is incredibly difficult to come up with any set of variables that can reliably predict how a wine will age.
In general, we know that red wines that are higher in acid, have lower pHs, and have a good amount of tannin are better candidates for aging than wines without these characteristics. BUT this does not explain many ‘modern’ Napa wines, for instance, that do not fit this model.
This also does not take into account methods that winemakers may use to either increase or decrease potential age ability. One example may be racking - if they do so; and if they do, when and how often.
Against so many variables, but the discussion is quite fun!
The discrepancies are caused by seal issues, not by the wines. The factors that cause wines to hold up well to being coravined are the same as the ones that make them age well. I coravin wines in my lab to allow me to analyze the same bottle over time. Some bottles I’ve coravined 20 times. How the wine responds is so variable because how the cork responds is so variable. Which means how much oxygen gets into the wine over subsequent days, weeks, and months, is variable.
I have one, and honestly I don’t think it’s too useful for the average consumer - the standard one at least. A 750 has so few servings in it that even at a glass a day you still get through a bottle in less than a week. For situations like that the pivot version (the one with the special valve cap you put in after opening the bottle) is definitely more sensible, and it’s both cheaper and more argon-efficient to boot.
I think the normal coravin is useful if you’re doing wine study and are extracting very small amounts at once for tasting over an extended period, or are a wine bar serving a bottle BTG that’s expensive enough that you’re not sure it’ll get finished before it deteriorates. There’s probably other uses, but that’s what I can think of at the moment.
I’ve always felt I’m above average
I don’t use it often, but when I do, it’s genuinely useful. My wife drinks very little wine and no red at all. When I want a glass of red with a hearty meal, it’s great to have that option. And I may not get back to the bottle for months.
Cheers,
Warren
I’ve had some Cora-dou…er…Corvined bottles purchased from auction. Initially the wines seem to perform fine. Nice aroma and palate. But within an hour or so they become hollowed out. As soon as you get to the midpalate they are just sort of empty or at least are not persistent.
This technology has not been tested across wine making techniques and decades of storage. It certainly sounds good and sound on the surface but we barely know what happens when wines age under cork under ideal conditions from the standpoint of science and data. Even experienced tasters do not always agree with how wines perform over time. Coravin is ‘inserting’ another huge variable with no track record or study behind it.
I personally see no need for Coravin outside of a wine bar sort of situation. I don’t really understand why they would be used at home. Open the bottle or don’t. You can’t cheat time.
If you Coravin you can just take a wee bit to taste. Its not the fill that gives it away. Its the hole in the capsule and the mark on the cork. I think when it first came out the awareness wasn’t really out there. So people were taking tastes and then selling the wines. Again, a cheat. So auctions might not have picked it up because some capsules are made with holes sometimes. I bought some bottles some years back that clearly were in this window of time when there was a lag between the use and the awareness. It was not a nice surprise but the upshot was that I got to try some wines that had been treated or mistreated this way.
Glad it worked for you Warren. Success with a single bottle isn’t a particularly strong reassurance. I had too many failures out beyond intervals as short as two weeks to trust the Coravin beyond a week. I tried all the recommended tricks. Still don’t understand how some people are having low or zero failure rates many months out.
My failure rate isn’t zero, but this forgotten bottle was a pleasant surprise. I don’t use Coravin frequently enough to have a firm stance, though both here and elsewhere there are strong and opposing opinions on nearly everything. Coravin clearly has its two camps.
