With the release of the innovative Coravin onto the Irish Market, the often tongue-in-cheek statement ‘’Just the one ’’ can now become a reality, if you want it to. The Coravin 1000 System allows wine enthusiasts to enjoy wine by the glass without committing to the whole bottle. The innovative wine access technology leaves the cork in place, safeguarding the wine from oxidation, thusly allowing the wine to evolve naturally and essentially untouched.
Created by inventor and wine enthusiast Greg Lambrecht, who originally trained as a nuclear scientist before moving into medicine and mechanical engineering, this is somewhat more than another transient wine-gadget along the lines of Wine Aerators from a few years ago, to name one.
This neat and quite simple design allows one to access the contents of a bottle without feeling wasteful or self-indulgent when your curiosity gets the better of you and you can’t resist compromising a bottle for the sake of a glass or even a taste! This is often, for me anyway, the difficulty. It’s not always the desire for a glass of wine at the end of a long day, which is also a thing, but an insatiable desire to know what a particular bottle will yield. It is advantageous also for having a glass with dinner when the usual someone to share a bottle with is unavailable. This incidentally was the inventor’s inspiration. With his wife expecting their first child, he found himself drinking for one, while she was ‘not drinking’ for two. A practical problem solver by trade and by trait, he developed the Coravin System in answer to this gap in effectiveness.
The exact process involves the passing of a thin, hollow needle through the foil and cork to access the wine. Then the bottle is pressurized with argon, an inert gas in the air we breathe that winemakers have been using for years. The argon pressurization pushes the wine through the needle so that it flows into your glass without letting any oxygen in the bottle. Once the needle is removed, the cork naturally reseals itself, and the remaining wine continues to evolve in the way it would had it not been breached.
In this way, wine lovers can enjoy and share the same bottle during multiple occasions, over weeks, months or years without waste and also enabling wine drinkers to access wine across multiple bottles during a single occasion. For those who create cellar envy in the rest of us, it allows an opportunity to compare vintage variation from the same producers and to keep tabs on the progression and maturation of good and great wines.
Its application for restaurateurs who would like to offer particularly fine wines by the glass, is obvious. And at €299 it is vastly more cost effective than temperature-controlled cabinets such as the Enomatic that holds multiple bottles, but these are hardly suitable for domestic use, and anyway claim only to preserve the wine for three weeks.
Probably the most famous wine writer in the world, Robert Parker has called Coravin “the most transformational and exciting new product for wine lovers that has been developed or invented in the last 30-plus years.”
It may make for more contemplative wine drinking among other things. Coravin is available from WineOnline.ie at €299.00 and can be ordered here, with free delivery anywhere in Ireland.