Review: Coravin Sparkling

The eponymous wine preservation system made by Coravin has been transformative in the wine world, allowing you to extract wine from any bottle sealed with a cork without having to open the bottle or expose it to air. One of its few flaws, however, is that it doesn’t work with sparkling wines. In fact, piercing a champagne cork with Coravin’s needle would likely be catastrophic.

Coravin has finally remedied this issue, but fans of fizz will need to buy a whole new device that’s designed just for preserving sparkling wines. It will also mean mastering yet another wine gadget—the Coravin Sparkling—and as Coravin fans likely know, the company’s products aren’t the most intuitive devices to use.

To that end, the Quick Start Guide for the Coravin Sparkling is a solid five pages of text, and users are well advised to read every word of it and maybe watch a video on how the thing works. Like the original Coravin, the Sparkling is designed to insert gas into a bottle, but the mechanics of the process are entirely different.

Coravin's new device preserves sparkling wines by pumping the open bottle with CO₂.

Photograph: Coravin

Step one: Open the bottle. This may be anathema to Coravin users who can drink an entire bottle of wine without ever removing the cork, but it’s a necessity this time around. There’s just no other way to get to the juice inside unless the bottle is breached.

Step two: Drink all you want.

Step three: Here’s where you’ll need to study up. While the beauty of Coravin is that it’s self-contained, Coravin Sparkling requires a bit more gear. The secret of Coravin Sparkling is found in its custom stopper, a bulky cylinder that clips onto the lip of the bottle. You’ll need to use some force to get the stopper attached; a locking handle slides down to ensure a solid seal, keeping air where it is supposed to be. Next, enter the Coravin Sparkling Charger, a lightsaber-looking device that is loaded up with compressed CO₂, much like the original Coravin’s argon canisters. Press the Charger down on the top of the stopper and it dispenses CO₂ directly into the bottle through a one-way valve. A small indicator (mechanical, like a tire pressure meter) changes from red to green when you’ve hit the appropriate level of pressure inside the bottle. Release the Charger and you’re done. Your bottle is now re-pressurized and can be stored for two to four weeks, depending on which page on the Coravin website you read, preferably in the refrigerator and on its side (a neat trick, as most aftermarket stoppers will leak if stored sideways).

Photograph: Coravin

So how well does it all work? Like the Coravin 1.0, nearly perfectly. I experimented with the Coravin Sparkling using two different bottles of sparkling wine. I emptied around one-third of the first bottle, left it for two weeks untouched, then tasted it again. The second bottle I emptied one glass at a time over three different sessions over the course of two weeks, ending with the bottle about a third full for a final tasting. At no point in the process did either wine seem much different than when I first uncorked them. Both were bright and full of flavor and effervescence, a far cry from the tepid fizz you end up with after a day or two when using a standard champagne stopper. However, I did find that the emptier the bottle was, the quicker it lost its carbonation once poured into a glass, so it’s probably best not to plan on keeping that one final glass of prosecco around forever.

Getting stoppers on and off can be tricky, but the system is easy to master with a little practice, just like the original Coravin. The system is also decidedly costly: $399 for the unit and two stoppers, plus four CO₂ capsules. (Each capsule can refill seven bottles.) Extra stoppers run $90 for a two-pack. Six CO₂ capsules run $45—a better deal than the $53 Coravin charges for six smaller argon capsules, which are used for still wines.

The Coravin Sparkling system effectively proves that once a sparkling wine bottle is open, the only way to keep it fresh is to replace the gas that escaped upon opening. That said, you’ll spend more on the Coravin Sparkling than even the priciest standard still-wine Coravin model, which is funny, because it doesn’t seem nearly as technologically advanced. (The original Coravin is built around a spinal surgical needle, while this unit just blows gas through a rubber valve.) Still, is $400 too high a price to pay to ensure you don’t have to finish off that bottle of Dom Perignon ’96 all in one sitting? Don’t answer that.