While it’s unlikely Plato had wine preservation systems in mind when he said, “necessity is the mother of invention,” it was the temporary loss of his drinking partner to pregnancy that drove Greg Lambrecht to develop Coravin.
“I found myself either not opening a bottle of wine when I wanted to only have one glass, or opening a bottle and eventually throwing away oxidised wine,” he says.
“Initially, it was this specific problem that drove me to invent a system for wine, but I soon realised that what I was really searching for was a means to drink any wine, in any amount, from any bottle, whenever I wanted, without having to think about when I would return to that bottle again.”
As a physicist and engineer who had spent many years developing medical technologies (including, importantly, the needle used to administer epidurals, which is what the needle used in the Coravin Timeless system is based on), and who was at the time the CEO of a medical implant company, Greg was uniquely placed to figure out a way to “teleport wine from the bottle.”
But it didn’t happen overnight. It took 12 years, several prototypes, and lots of blind tastings before Coravin was finally launched in 2011. And, although the Coravin Timeless quickly became the wine preservation system of choice for both connoisseurs and restaurants who wanted to be able to offer premium wines by the glass – “A glass of wine is poured using Coravin every second of every day” – the fact that it didn’t work on sparkling wines “genuinely pained” Greg.
So, in 2021, after eight years and 18 iterations, Coravin Sparkling hit the market. It’s quite a different system to the Timeless, which uses a thin, hollow needle to pierce the cork, siphon wine and then inject argon gas to force out any oxygen, without opening the bottle.
Because sparkling wine contains carbon dioxide which naturally pushes out oxygen, it’s safe to open the bottle to pour – providing you can reseal it properly afterward to keep oxygen out and CO2 in. The Coravin Sparkling system does just this. Once a bottle has been opened and a glass poured, it’s resealed using a specialised stopper. A CO2 charger is then used to top up any carbon dioxide that escaped from the bottle while it was open, keeping the wine fizzy and fresh.
While the company officially says the system will preserve sparkling wine for four weeks, it’s much longer in reality. “I’ve been testing out sparkling wines that are still in pristine condition a year after the first pour,” says Greg. “The amount of remaining wine doesn't impact the efficacy of the Sparkling system. As we say, the last glass should be as good as the first.”
“Coravin has completely changed the way I drink wine,” he adds. “Now, I can come home and just have a single glass of Champagne, and it means I can have around six sparkling wines open at any given time to choose from.”
Learn more about the Coravin Sparkling system on the Coravin website.
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