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 led 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, crucially, the needle used to administer epidurals, Greg was uniquely placed to figure out a way to “teleport wine from the bottle.”
Still, it didn’t happen overnight. With R&D restricted to the hours outside his role as CEO of a medical implant company, it took 12 years, several prototypes, and lots of blind tastings before Coravin was officially launched in 2011. And although the system was swiftly adopted by both like-minded connoisseurs as well as restaurateurs and sommeliers who wanted to be able to offer premium wines by the glass (today, a glass of wine is poured somewhere around the world using Coravin every single second), the fact that it didn’t work on sparkling wines “genuinely pained” Greg.
But in 2021, after a further eight years and 18 iterations, the Coravin Sparkling system hit the market. Unlike the Timeless system, which allows still wine to be siphoned from an unopened bottle by inserting a thin, hollow, epidural-style needle through the cork, the carbon dioxide in sparkling wine means it’s safe to open the bottle and pour. The key to preserving sparkling wine is resealing it properly afterwards to keep oxygen out and CO2 in.
To do this, the Coravin Sparkling system uses a specialised stopper to completely seal the bottle, and a CO2 charger that is used to restore lost carbon dioxide by pumping it through the stopper into the bottle to keep the wine fizzy and fresh.
Officially, the company says the system will preserve sparkling wine for four weeks (at a recent demonstration held in the Halliday office, we truly could not tell the difference between a freshly opened bottle of House of Arras and one that had been opened a month ago and preserved with Coravin), but in reality it’s much longer. “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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