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Q: How do you drink a bottle of wine without pulling the cork? A: Coravin .
Christina Lu / BuzzFeed
Wine gadgets — stuff like aerators, fridge-sized preservation systems, and wildly elaborate bottle openers — are generally worthy of suspicion, targeted toward wine hobbyists who are either too gullible to know better or too flush with disposable income to care. (If you're tempted by this tiny $500 wine sarcophagus, perhaps I could interest you in several other items in the latest Skymall catalog?)
So it's easy to be skeptical of the Coravin, a product launched last July that has been described by voices across the wine establishment as "transformational," "revolutionary," and "a threshold in the wine industry over which we have passed, and will never return." Those are words that raise eyebrows — especially when they're attached to something with a $300 price tag.
This white whale of wine gadgets does a seemingly impossible thing: It lets you pour wine from a bottle without damaging or removing the cork, and preserves the wine left in the bottle by replacing the empty space with inert argon gas. In theory, this lets the wine continue aging peacefully without spoiling for as long as you want — even if it's 15 years. That's important because a bottle of wine, once opened, goes bad fast (unlike, say, a bottle of Scotch). As soon as you pop the cork, a chemical reaction with oxygen starts to change the flavor, and within a few days the wine can go from incredible to undrinkable.
The Coravin at rest.
Macey J. Foronda
Anything that promises to not just slow down but skirt the oxidation problem entirely could make a huge difference for restaurants — they won't have to rush to sell an open bottle by the glass before it goes bad — and for any human who wants to try a wine without polishing off (or paying for) the whole bottle. Wine sales reps, who have to offer small samples to lots of different people, and sommelier students learning to identify countless varieties of wine also have reason to be excited. But does it really work? And if it does, is it as big a deal as people seem to think?
Gadget in hand, Coravin inventor and company founder Greg Lambrecht met me for a tasting so I could see for myself. We met at Costata, a newish steakhouse in downtown Manhattan where beverage director (and Coravin convert) Hristo Zisovski was on hand to show the device in action and lend certified-sommelier credibility to the proceedings.
Despite his credentials (two engineering degrees from MIT and decades spent inventing high-tech medical devices), Lambrecht doesn't in any way play the high-minded scientist. He's an energetic man in his forties with floppy hair and a big, boyish grin, and an enthusiastic and articulate prophet of his gadget gospel. He makes seemingly involuntary little happiness noises ("oof!") every time he sticks his nose into a glass of really good wine.
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