Device Pours Wine Without Opening Bottle

If walking on water is just too hard, you can still amaze your friends and confound your enemies by pouring a bottle of wine without ever removing the cork.

 Better still, it takes no God-like or supernatural powers. All it takes is a Coravin, a new piece of “wine access technology” from a Boston inventor-slash-entrepreneur-slash-wine geek who was looking for a way drink a glass of his favorite vino without having to finish off (or pour out) the entire bottle.

 Resembling something of a cross between a microscope and a hypodermic syringe for the Jolly Green Giant, the Coravin works by pushing a thin, hollow needle through a wine cork, then injecting argon gas into the bottle, which displaces the wine and allows the user to pour it in a glass through a spout.

 The trick, if you can call it that, is that the hole in the needle is in the side, not the tip, so when it’s inserted in a cork and removed it leaves no opening; the elastic cork simply closes back up again. With the cork intact and the empty space in the bottle filled with argon gas, no oxygen can get in to degrade the wine.

 Wine writers as respected as Jancis Robinson have vouched for the Coravin, and groups of sommeliers in San Francisco and New York were reportedly unable to taste any difference in wines that had been sampled via a Coravin, left for nine months, then sampled again.

 Now, the Coravin is not exactly cheap, costing $299 on Amazon. But great wine isn’t cheap either. And the chance to drink it a glass at a time without the wine ever going bad?