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The Coravin: Wines by the Milliliter
Posted by Accessories | Posted on 10-07-2013
| Posted inThis summer, a groundbreaking wine device was released after years of research, and it immediately took the wine world by storm.
Online bulletin boards started buzzing, sommeliers started salivating, and collectors clamored to get their hands on one. So much has already been written about the Coravin that there’s not much more to be said about the device itself. In short, the Coravin was invented by a medical device entrepreneur as a way to access wine in a bottle without removing the cork, by piercing the enclosure with a slender hollow needle and injecting Argon gas that displaces the wine that is forced out.
The idea is, because the natural properties of cork allow it to reseal itself after being pierced, you can remove wine from a bottle, place it back into storage, and revisit the same wine days, weeks, or months (years?) later without it suffering the usual effects, such as oxidization, of an open bottle. As boutique wine importer Lyle Fass told me, “For old wines [the Coravin] is miraculous.” Fass tasted a 1971 Chateau Beycheville that had been accessed a month earlier and reported that “it was fresh, vibrant, delicate and had not degraded at all.” This understandably has many wine collectors excited about the ability to sample their bottles at various points on the aging curve, but as Fass notes, “[Coravin] will change the game for restaurants.”
Restaurants were basically the laboratories for testing the Coravin. Del Posto, the elegant temple of Italian cuisine in Manhattan, has been offering wines by the glass using a Coravin for the last year. The list includes glasses of Piedmontese superstars like Gaja and Conterno for $200. Like Eric Asimov, who was skeptical of astronomic by-the-glass prices at NoMad, I was not convinced that simply using a Coravin to serve a traditional 6-ounce pour would reinvent restaurant wine programs.
Enter barmini by José Andrés. The Spanish chef, long known for pushing traditional boundaries in his cuisine, has established a “cocktail lab” next door to his molecular gastronomy showcase, minibar. Under wine director Lucas Paya, barmini is using the Coravin in the most innovative way I have seen.