The Wine Gadget To End All Wine Gadgets
Photo credit: Coravin
If the hype around a new product called the Coravin is to be believed, it could change the way you drink wine forever. FOR-EV-ER.
The gadget, which retails for a lofty $299, extracts wine from a bottle via a medical-grade needle, which pushes right into the cork. It simultaneously preserves the remaining wine in the bottle by filling the empty space with inert (undetectable!) argon gas. That’s some fancy stuff, which is probably why this sucker is also sold by Neiman Marcus.
For more info (and pleasing gifs!), check out this thorough BuzzFeed article. Restaurant industry bigwigs have weighed in, among them Maialino wine director Jeff Kellogg, who said nowadays he feels like he’s “half Coravin salesman and half sommelier.”
But BuzzFeed Food writer Rachel Sanders raises a valid point: isn’t leftover wine an oxymoron?
"Being on the same page about a single bottle of wine, even if it’s two-buck Chuck, is a large part of the fun," writes Sanders. "So a gadget that measures out individual portions of wine, especially when it resembles some kind of predatory microscope, could just be the latest depressing symbol of a tech-obsessed, deeply selfish, single-serve consumer culture."
Preach, Sanders. On the other hand, if we ever find ourselves in the possession of the world’s most expensive bottle of wine—hey, it could happen—maybe we’d invest in the Coravin. Until then, we got it covered.
[via Buzzfeed]
UPDATE: On June 2, 2014, Coravin issued a statement that “in certain circumstances, wine bottles can burst when used with the Coravin System, presenting a risk of lacerations” and that it had “voluntarily reported these incidences to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in anticipation of a recall.” So, uh, proceed with caution, folks.
