I enjoy a glass of wine in the evening as I'm making dinner or simply relaxing with my Kindle. Sometimes I need that glass of wine after a particularly memorable day at the office.. or since SB came home with a new guitar and is teaching himself how to play it by watching Youtube instructional videos.
The problem is that my preferred wine is red, which SB is allergic to. I cannot drink a whole bottle alone, no matter how badly he plays, and after a couple of days my red is rendered undrinkable. I have been told a younger, full-bodied red wine will last up to five days before turning south but that's still not a great solution since I don't drink every day.
I read about an interesting solution designed by a company called Coravin. Their Wine Access System 1000 (was there a 1 through 999?) has the same idea as some of the other systems out there that pump gas back into the bottle to try to slow down the reaction with oxygen, but they have decided to extract the wine through a needle in the corkscrew so that you don't have to remove the cork, and then the volume that you extract is replaced with argon to prevent oxidation.
The opener will probably retail for HK$2400, which is a lot of money until I think about the amount of wine that I have had to dump over the years. Coravin points out that the opener would make wine culture less of an elite hobby because we could spread the cost of an expensive bottle over several occasions. Bars and restaurants could also charge less if the bottles that were opened didn't have to be thrown out after a day. Or better yet, they could afford to stock better wines!
I'm getting very excited about this idea (why didn't I think of it?). I could probably offset the cost by using my Wine Access System 1000 in the grocery store to sample the wines so that I don't need to ever worry about purchasing a bad wine ever again. I'm sure that no one would mind me taking a teeny, tiny extraction in the name of quality checking.
The problem is that my preferred wine is red, which SB is allergic to. I cannot drink a whole bottle alone, no matter how badly he plays, and after a couple of days my red is rendered undrinkable. I have been told a younger, full-bodied red wine will last up to five days before turning south but that's still not a great solution since I don't drink every day.
I read about an interesting solution designed by a company called Coravin. Their Wine Access System 1000 (was there a 1 through 999?) has the same idea as some of the other systems out there that pump gas back into the bottle to try to slow down the reaction with oxygen, but they have decided to extract the wine through a needle in the corkscrew so that you don't have to remove the cork, and then the volume that you extract is replaced with argon to prevent oxidation.
The opener will probably retail for HK$2400, which is a lot of money until I think about the amount of wine that I have had to dump over the years. Coravin points out that the opener would make wine culture less of an elite hobby because we could spread the cost of an expensive bottle over several occasions. Bars and restaurants could also charge less if the bottles that were opened didn't have to be thrown out after a day. Or better yet, they could afford to stock better wines!
I'm getting very excited about this idea (why didn't I think of it?). I could probably offset the cost by using my Wine Access System 1000 in the grocery store to sample the wines so that I don't need to ever worry about purchasing a bad wine ever again. I'm sure that no one would mind me taking a teeny, tiny extraction in the name of quality checking.
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