Nearly 20 years ago, Greg Lambrecht's drinking habits changed. He was used to sharing a decent bottle of wine with his wife over dinner, but when she became pregnant with their second child, he found opening a whole bottle meant half of it would end up in the sink. So he set about finding a solution, and now his Coravin wine system is the only one of its kind that allows users to pour a glass without popping the cork.
After conceiving the idea in 1998, Lambrecht – a medical device inventor and wine enthusiast from Burlington, Massachusetts – spent the next few years building prototypes and blind-tasting wine using his transformational invention. Then in June 2009, the first successful blind taste took place from a bottle of wine previously accessed five years earlier.
"This solves the age-old problem that wine oxidises after the cork is pulled," says Lambrecht, who pioneered a way of piercing through the cork to access the wine without allowing any oxygen into the bottle. The revolutionary design means wine aficionados, restaurants and bars can sample the best wines in their collection and keep them for weeks, months or even longer without impairing the quality of the wine. Plus, it reduces the amount of wine that goes to waste.
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The Coravin wine system works by passing a needle through both the foil wrapping and the cork. A push of a button then pumps a little argon – an inert gas winemakers have used for many years – into the bottle. The pressure from the argon then pushes the wine through the needle so it flows into the glass, eliminating any chance of oxidisation. Once removed, the cork naturally reseals itself, allowing the bottle to continue to age naturally. That's certainly something to raise a glass to.
Coravin Model II Elite Wine System, £279 (including two Coravin argon capsules); coravin.co.uk
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