I LIKE smart marketing; it doesn’t try to sell something that we desire as much as it works at creating a need. And everyone knows that while we may wish to allow ourselves a few indulgences every now and then, what we actually need are things of priority and ones which cannot be procrastinated. Luxury brands do it all the time; they want you to pine for something so bad that you have to sell a kidney to get it. I’m not even making that last bit up—it actually happened in China and the popular French luggage brand, which I’m talking about, shall remain unnamed and yet everyone knows about it.
The same way, wine savers have quite a grip on the market. The more expensive they get, the more the market seems to clamour for it. It’s as if having and drinking expensive wine aren’t enough, now we must show that we also deploy the best in safety measures to ensure that nothing is lost as we put it away for another day.
Inasmuch as the gadget groupie that I admittedly am, there are certain joys, certain efforts that I would never trust a machine with. Tying a bow tie is one of them. Putting my pup to sleep. Polishing my shoes. In fact, most of them I wouldn’t trust to anybody else but me. Safe to say that one can add saving wine from an evening to that list.
Not that I do it any better or have some ingenious technique that is yet to patented. It’s just that I don’t trust any contraption to do the job any better than what I can manage with the most basic of props. Now don’t slot me with the Amish just yet; as I said above, I am an absolute lover of all things electronic or mechanical and short of coming outside for a new phone release. I would and certainly do go out of my way to acquire technology and cloak myself in it. But with wine, the human element is so strong and intuitive that machines just don’t cut it.
There is many a toy out there that promises to protect your wine: from the frugally basic stoppers to the slightly more advanced, which can suck some air out. And then, beyond that, starts the world of the real doohickeys: cans with gases that are lighter than air, machines which replace air with nitrogen, and the latest, one that punctures the bottle and uses inert argon gas to fill as it syringes the wine out. Safe to say that as cost goes up, the promised protection would appear to be assuredly more reliable.
And yet, on enough occasions, more often than I wold be comfortable to let slide, I have found that the wine that poured from behind the walls of these devices never tasted the same. It wasn’t merely psychological, many a time I didn’t know where the wine came from—a new bottle or a machine—and yet each time I was correct about the provenance. The taste and, most pertinently, the aromas were different. Any wine that I tried from a machine somehow smelled dead to me. There was this stench of dried out despair in the wine that always gave it away; like something that had died a slow, painful, asphyxiating death. A newly opened bottle, by contrast, was always bright and lively, a far contrast from the horrors of those caged cases.
Now I am not saying that leaving a bottle open versus sticking it in a highly complex wine preservation system will give you equal results, I am merely trying to usher in the idea that these devices don’t do as much as they promise. Sure they may help preserve the wine a bit longer but there are many caveats along the way. What if the machine isn’t entirely clean, and in many cases that is what spoils the wine? What if there is a leak in the gas chambers and some oxygen does get in? How can we be sure that just because a gas is inert and inhibits bacteria, its physical proximity to the wine won’t change it in some way? Helium makes us sound funny, what if argon affects our olfactory receptors? I may sound like a sceptic but I have had too many statistical disappointments to believe otherwise.
So, preserving a wine hasn’t really improved since man first stuck a piece of bark in the bottleneck. Screw caps do a mighty fine job of a closure and I am okay with them. But if you ask me, and if you really wish to know, there is one and only one to make sure an open bottle doesn’t spoil: get some friends together and finish it.
The writer is a sommelier
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