Bob's Blog: Give it Air
OPINION: “Have a look at this” said a good friend as he passed me a cutout from The Times with the heading “The wine gadget sommeliers say can make your £10 bottle taste better”.
“Until now, there has not been a scalable automated product that creates single-serve formats and maintains the quality of the wine inside for months, as opposed to weeks,” says Greg Lambrecht, Coravin founder and inventor. The Coravin Vinitas machine can fill 90 sample bottles in an hour without contact with air using food grade inert gas, avoiding the need to ship full size bottle samples.
Coravin claims that shipping up to seven 100ml sample bottles will reduce the shipper’s carbon footprint and drop freight costs by more than 85%.
The sample bottles are made of 100% recyclable glass and capping material, but cannot be re-used. Coravin Vinitas is not yet available in New Zealand but has recently been released in the United Kingdom where, according to Harpers, the filling machine is available for rental at around £750 a month, with the cost of £1 per sample-size bottle, making the system cost-effective for expensive wines.
