Coravin: handy device that lets you try wine without uncorking the bottle
Wine aficionados with no one to split a bottle with, collectors, and spouses of teetotallers are embracing a clever tool that helps keep wine from spoiling longer. It takes some practice, though
One question that never seems to get old when you reveal to people that your version of studying involves tasting lots of different types of wine is, “You must drink loads of good wine, then?” Regrettably, this truly isn’t the case (at least, not while I’m studying). Loath as I am to play the consummate wine snob, even my well-exercised liver lacks the capacity to process whole bottles of the myriad (many, sadly, rather average) wines that I’m required to know intimately in order to pass the Master of Wine tasting exams.
Thus, were I an MW student even a mere three years ago, my household would likely have been responsible for a shameful portion of Hong Kong’s wine effluent (there are, after all, only so many friends who will accept “gifts” of half-empty bottles of white zinfandel). Fortunately, thanks to what is arguably one of the most innovative wine tools to hit the market in decades, I am now a far less egregious polluter of Hong Kong’s delicate water systems.
Enter the Coravin: God’s gift to singletons, wine collectors and spouses of teetotallers everywhere. Never again need a bottle of pinot grigio be glugged in one night for fear of next-day spoilage, never again need a bottle of 10-year-old Bordeaux be drunk too early (or too late).
As a necessary disclaimer, I should note that the head of Asia Pacific for Coravin is a pal of mine, but my abiding love for this lifesaving device well pre-dates his role at the company and fortunately for my frail, human sense of journalistic ethics I have more Coravin capsules, needles and even whole devices than I am ever likely to need.
Apart from its general brilliance, the Coravin is making an appearance in this column because it is quite possibly the world’s best wine study tool. With June exams rapidly approaching, my biweekly study group is sufficiently well-attended that we no longer feel much compunction about simply opening all the bottles for each session, but for the odd big-ticket wine we’ll still usually break out the Coravin to save as much wine as possible.
Meanwhile, my solo at-home study is still heavily Coravin-aided. Following a plan advocated by an MW who passed his tasting exams on his first go (but still insists he’s a lousy taster), I blind taste two wines at random every morning. Assuming it has a standard-issue cork (sadly excluding most sparkling and many fortified wines), pretty much any wine could come up.
Happily, having the Coravin means that far from having just killed your one shot at spotting that wine correctly, you can simply yank out the needle, replace the bottle horizontally in the fridge (after having given it a reasonable period standing upright in warmer air to regain its seal, in my experience) and it lives to befuddle you another day.
In finishing, I should note that there are numerous pitfalls of Coravin usage, nearly all of which I suspect I, as a heavy user, have unearthed. One, it should never be used with a screw cap, a mistake that occurs more often than you’d think. Two, it doesn’t work brilliantly with plastic corks (the kind that seal many of the wines I study with), which don’t readily reseal themselves after puncture the way a natural cork does, so save it for your better bottles. Three, it can take a little practice to extract wine smoothly – first-time pourers will often pump the lever somewhat too vigorously, expressing several spurts of gas into the headspace and rapidly discovering why it is that the wine trade’s uniform of choice is black.
