One of the best restaurant trends of the past couple of decades has been the increase of wines being offered by the glass in restaurants and bars. Wines that are reliably fresh and ready to be drunk as the wine maker intended. This was not always the case. Customers who remember the 90s will recall regularly drinking glasses of wine both at home and in restaurants that were oxidised and frankly not fit for the gravy.
These days have truly been confined to the wheelie bin of history thanks to wine preservation systems like those being offered by market leader Coravin and, as a consequence, today many restaurants offer a wide range of wines that allow you to drink a glass of Chardonnay while your companion drinks, say, Riesling and then to switch to red with the main. Equally Coravin products allow you to enjoy flexi drinking at home, without having to commit to the whole bottle. Albeit, these systems do not come cheap and are beyond the means of many consumers…until perhaps now.
Coravin has brought out a new and cheaper way of keeping your wine in perfect condition at home with their brand new Pivot preserver. The needle system that extracts a glass of wine without pulling the cork has gone but the Pivot still uses Argon gas to protect the wine from oxidation.
The way this works is simple. Pull the cork, or open any other closure, and replace with a pivot stopper. Next, insert the Pivot Device to access your wine while pressurising your bottle with Argon gas. The wine will be preserved for at least four weeks in perfect condition.
Greg Lambrecht, the inventor and founder of Coravin, turned a problem into an opportunity when his wife fell pregnant in the late nineties and gave up drinking. Greg, a trained nuclear engineer with a career in medical tech, was reluctant to start drinking a bottle of wine on his own. Instead, he locked himself away in his garden shed and came up with a solution in the form of the Coravin prototype. There are of course many other reasons for wanting a preservation system at home, be it the ability to enjoy multiple bottles of wine simultaneously or perhpas ensure the quality of an older bottle in advance of people coming round for supper.
Lambrecht is delighted that the Pivot offers not only their cheapest preservation system to date but the quickest pour yet. “We’re really excited to continue revolutionising the way the world drinks wine,” he says, “and to offer more the ability to drink the wine they want, in the way they want, while ensuring that the last glass tastes as amazing as the first.”
From our perspective, it means you can gain extra value from that special bottle, enjoying it in perfect condition on several consecutive days, in the same way that you might enjoy a box of chocolates. We also love the fact that you can compare and contrast different wines without fear of ever wasting any of them.
The best news, however, is that Coravin are offering the Pivot (including two stoppers and one Coravin Pure Capsule) at the launch price of £99 until the end of December. After that it will be £119.
Find the Pivot® Wine Preservation System at coravin.co.uk, Selfridges or Harrods.