I tested the Coravin on everything from $10 bottles of Sauvignon Blanc to $150 bottles of Napa Cabernet, and it worked exactly as claimed. For instance, I Coravinned—wine geeks have already turned this into a verb—a 1991 Parducci Petite Sirah. Normally, if you pull the cork on a 22-year-old wine, it's as dead as a doornail by the next morning (older wines oxidize very rapidly). With the Coravin, I extracted my first glass in mid-July. It tasted great: old, to be sure, but with a complex aroma and dry, spiced-plum fruit. Two weeks later, I poured another glass. It tasted the same. Two weeks after that, ditto. I also tested Coravinned wines against brand-new bottles. Even after three months, it was impossible to tell them apart.
But so what? Why spend $300 on a gadget that sucks wine out of an unopened bottle? Three hundred dollars could buy you a new TV, after all (which will then suck your brain out of your unopened head, but that's a discussion for another time). Given that the cost of the argon cartridges works out to about 65 cents a glass, the device doesn't really make sense for everyday, affordable wines. But the Coravin is an amazing tool for someone who buys expensive wine and doesn't finish every bottle the day it's opened; or who wants to treat their wine fridge like an in-home wine bar, trying a bit of this and a bit of that whenever the mood strikes; or who wants to see whether that bottle of 2003 Château Haut-Brion they've been saving is ready to drink; or is learning about wine and wants to try five Pinot Noirs side by side without burning through five whole bottles. The device has caught on at high-end restaurants, too, because it allows sommeliers to pour glasses from expensive or rare bottles without having to worry about selling the rest of the bottle that night. Hristo Zisovski, beverage director for New York City's Altamarea Group, has been using a demo model of the Coravin for a year now. "I just poured a glass from a bottle of Friuli white—not even a tannic red—that I first started extracting wine from eight months ago. It was fresh as a daisy."
There are a few drawbacks to the Coravin besides the price. The argon cartridges ($30 for three) are supposedly good for 15 glasses of wine; I found that to be ambitious. The device can't be used with screw caps or plastic corks. Also, corks on extremely old bottles of wine are often dry and brittle, and I'd be wary before I punched even a Teflon-coated needle through the cork on a bottle of 1947 Pétrus. (Of course, most of the 1947 Pétrus out there is probably fake anyway, so who cares?) Regardless, that Parducci Petite Sirah, which I first poured for myself in July—without ever opening the bottle—was still drinking gorgeously four months later, and tasted just the way it did the first time I tried it.