from when they were released but little discussion. I was therefore wondering what ’er experience with them has been?Despite initially baulking at the price, I bought mine in July, and am fully converted. A lot of the discussion on the web has been about using them for long-term preservation of wine (e.g. having a glass a year or something) but that doesn’t seem to me to be the most useful function. Instead, I’ve found that it’s best at solving the problem of “I’d like to drink some nice Port but I don’t have the time to drink the whole bottle before it starts to fade” since it’s possible simply to draw a glass or two of wine and then put the bottle back in the cellar.
As a result, I’ve found I now usually have about 5 bottles on the go at once: a whiteI; a red; an old Port; a young Port; and something tawny; and can drink from them when I fancy. I also rather like being able to do spur of the moment comparison between ports and try some odder stuff where I couldn’t otherwise see myself drinking the whole bottle.
I haven’t, yet, had an exploding bottle, but I am a little concerned about the sediment. Since one has to lift the bottle to a higher angle then one would for normal pouring (so as to fill the neck completely), the sediment can get rather disturbed by the pouring. On one occasion, I managed to block the spout with a small piece; assumed that it was not pouring because of insufficient pressure; and therefore managed to overpressurise the bottle resulting in a bit of seepage over the next week. I’m not sure whether one of their smaller needles might help avoid this problem, although the flow rate is already very slow.
Is anyone else using one with any success?
suggests pouring from the coravin’ed bottle whilst keeping it horizontal. This makes good sense, although once the level falls below, say 50-60% and so the needle is not longer completely submerged in the wine, you are probably still left with the same problem. I suppose one answer might be to have one of those racks they use in champagne for slowly increasing the angle at which the maturing wine is stored so as to encourage all the sediment to collect around the cork. That said, I think I was unlucky with my Guimaraens ’96: the coravin needle is rather nicely engineered with (I presume) a Teflon coating and a slit in the side (rather than the point) that doesn’t seem to snag on anything. I also haven’t had any problems with older or weaker bottles (albeit the most I’ve pushed it is with a leaking Graham’s ’70).
