Coravin Experience since Jan 2023 - Very welcome for tips and discussion!

Hi! I wanted to tell about my experience with Coravin (timeless 6+) and also ask if anyone can share some general advice. I have had mine now since jan 2023 (229£) and I like it. I hope that some of my comments feel objective and valid and I am also very happy to know if I misunderstood something or did it wrong.

Cost per glass - "Coravined"

At first, I made a little calculation about how much coravin would cost per bottle and I believe I reached a value of around 6 euro per bottle and I thought it was not worth it for someone that perhaps drinks bottles for around 8-20 euros at the time. However, after this I had a rethink and the purpose is not really to extract a whole bottle but rather to extract 2-3 glasses perhps and then finish the bottle normally. It would also allow you to make a little mini (blind)tasting for yourself should you want to with several 50 ml samples or so.

I got a set with and even if I had perhaps 25% WSET class discount, it was still cheaper to go via a promotion and I got a set that had an aerator as well as some white wine caps meant for screw caps. As I understand it, the idea of these is that you would quickly remove a screw cap and put this temporary cap for which you can perforate and extract wine similar to a cork wine. I have zero science to back this up but I feel somewhat unsure that removing the screwcap entirely and put a new one will not cause a large oxygen inflow and also, I perhaps do not drink enough screwtop of higher value to make it worth it.

The aerator - I am not positive on the result of decanting wines but I often try to use it for red wines as coravin lend itself to drinking quite quickly. My impression though is that it works well enough. As to be expected, some wine is left inside so you may want to clean it out either via dipping it in water, blow some extra gas through it or blow through it.

Needle

Before buying a Coravin I heard about broken needles etc, either this is an old problem or people being uncareful, I do not know but it works quite well for mine

Pivot Model

I have not used this one but to me, it seems to be a cheaper version of the normal one where you remove the cork and pump out the wine in a similar fashion. According what Coravin says, it instead offers up to 4 weeks lasting wine in comparison to "weeks or years". As the price difference does not appear to be that great, I do not really understand how a wine lover would not fork out the 100£ difference for the better product. Perhaps it extracts wine faster? I understand the idea of a vacuvine solution, that is - pump out the oxigen and make it last a bit longer but this product seems to hit some sort of middlespot I am not sure people are aiming for. Anyways, what do I know?

Capsules

This works surprisingly well overall, I expected to have some issues at some point but it works flawlessly. At the time, it appears that 6pack costs 49.99£ on amazon which is 8.33£/unit

Alternative brand - Ourgon seems to have a more tidious version for about half the price, 55£ for 12 which is 4.58£/each one. Reviews on Amazon is not great but it seems to be 5 stars for people that read the instructions and 1 stars for people that does not. Initially, reading the reviews made me think that it is actually a good product but it appears it contains quite a lot of steps making it seem quite cumbersome where you have to get some sort of tool, acetone and just the description make it seem to be a bit more fiddly and hassly to motivate the price. However, as a longterm investment perhaps it is worth to learn it but I finished 8 capsules in 2 years, perhaps I can afford to pay full price.

Storing way

The only "drawback" of the coravin usage has been the fact that the cork takes sometime to "heal" or otherwise, it will leak. This means that you cannot really try 5-6 wines, put them horizontally and then expect no problem. Sometimes these wines will leak so what I do is to put them vertically or semivertically in my wine fridge. The issue is, I can only put 2 wines or so in this way but hopefully there is no big issue of putting some wines in my wine fridge, some in my normal fridge and after 24h return them horizontally. The issue being, the variation in temperature.

Taste Difference etc

This will always be super subjective where you would have people that drink or eat anything not noticing any difference after 1 year and then you would have "wine experts" claiming to notice a difference between a coravin glass and not. In my case, I have studied WSET 2 and 3 and honestly I think there is a great variance when we taste wine on how perceive them which makes it quite difficult to have an objective assessment of flavours of wine as we fluctutate. We may have a nose blocked day, a light body wine after a full body wine, some salty food, a general shitty mood day or any other influence that may impair our judgement of a wine. Having this said, I feel that each coravined wine I have had has not been tainted.