The Evolution Of Wine Preservers

If you’re currently relaxing and unwinding with a cool-to-the-touch vino rosso in hand, take a brief moment to appreciate the experience in its totality. For millions of aficionados, wine drinking is a complete sensory journey like no other.

Gaze into the surface of the wine and admire its shimmering reflection, lightly hued like the color of pale, brushed velvet. Notice the aroma’s complexity – some fruity, some subtly spicy, others not relatively as easy to place.

And finally, take a healthy sip and note the crisp acidic and tannic textures of the wine as you swallow it.

You may not know it, but none of those sensations would be possible without wine preservation techniques evolving in ways no one could imagine over several millennia of trial, error, and experimentation.

Today’s wine preservers may include features like software and card readers; in ancient times, they contained little more than poorly sealed earthen jars to protect the wine from the elements.

Without a doubt, the evolution of wine preservation is an exciting tale stretching back millennia, culminating in our modern day with many exciting state-of-the-art capabilities.

ANCIENT TIMES – THE BEGINNING OF WINE PRESERVATION

In ancient times, wine preservation processes were in their formative years. During that time, humanity discovered that it was, indeed, possible to make wine from particular grapes using simple fermentation methods. But what was less clear to them was how to store and preserve it for extended periods. You don’t have to be a scientist to notice that the longer you expose the wine to air, the faster it spoils and rots. As wine drinkers, we’ve certainly come a long way, but our sense of taste is just as keen as ever. Archaeologists believe that the earliest form of wine preservation took place around 6,000 B.C. in the region of the world currently known as Georgia. The indigenous peoples at the time created large earthen vessels, coated the inner lining with beeswax, and buried them to preserve the wine. Once buried in these kvevri, the wine underwent a secondary, malolactic fermentation that further increased the wine’s potency.

CLASSIC ERA – PRESERVATION TECHNIQUES REFINED AND IMPROVED

Likewise, the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans used a similar technique by creating amphora designed explicitly for wine. These ceramic vessels, sometimes lined with pine wax, had long, slim necks to minimize the wine’s exposure to air. The shape of the amphora also allowed for sediment to collect on the bottom when stored underground.

Whether using an amphora or a kvevri, the ancient man’s biggest challenge was sealing the jars reliably. They used materials like moist clay, resin, or reeds to close the vessels well enough to preserve the wine’s flavors and aroma.

Near the end of the Roman period in Europe, wooden wine barrels were invented as an alternative to the heavy ceramic amphora that wasn’t necessarily designed to transport liquids over long distances. This method of preservation and transportation would become the norm for centuries as European cultures each refined their own techniques, with a particular emphasis on glass bottling in the 1600s.

The fruits of those efforts are what fueled several 21st-century inventors’ quest to preserve wine for more extended periods without spoiling it.

EARLY 1990’S – INTRODUCING THE CRUVINET WINE SYSTEM

In the early 1990s, the first wine dispenser and preserveration machine to garner international acclaim were the Cruvinet and Winekeeper wine systems. Generally, they works similar to a beer tap but with crucial distinctions.

Like a beer tap, the Cruvinet wine system maintains a steady cold temperature but utilizes nitrogen gas, not carbon dioxide gas, to preserve and dispense the wine as needed.

Nitrogen gas acts as a displacer for the oxygen in the atmosphere, in this case, the atmosphere inside of a wine bottle. Ancient man knew that wine spoiled, but he had no way to understand the chemical process of oxidation as we do in our time.

The idea behind using nitrogen is that it prevents oxidation from occurring in the first place, thus preserving the wine for weeks at a time in a dispensary system.

The original models contained several taps and led the way for how restaurants and bars alike poured wine by the glass.

It was the success of the Cruvinet wine system that opened the way for the next breakthrough: the Enomatic.

EARLY 2000’S – BREAKTHROUGHS CONTINUE WITH THE ENOMATIC SYSTEM

In the early 2000s, Rinaldini Distribution Inc. introduced the Enomatic system to the U.S. market. The Enomatic system was the first fully-automated wine preserver created by current Wineemotion CEO Riccardo Gosi – one of two Tuscan entrepreneurs to collaborate on the system.

What made the Enomatic system distinct from the Cruvinet system was this: it was fully automated and served up to three precisely controlled portions; the taste, half glass and full glass.

With the self-serve feature of the Enomatic, many tasting rooms and wine bars sprung up around the United States featuring this innovative technology. It offered guests the ability to taste wine on their own terms and build their palates one ounce at a time.

2005 – WINESTATION ENTERS THE MARKET

In 2005, Napa Technology launched their WineStation product line to some success. The WineStation comes as a single model, a modular 4-bottle wine dispenser, which is used by both residential and business settings. The WineStation can be effective, but there are more products available today with a wider range of models.

2011 – CORAVIN ENTERS THE MARKET

In 2011, Coravin entered the market as a competitor to the WineStation, but there’s an enormous difference to keep in mind. WineStations are dispensers, but the Coravin is an aerator that uses a unique technique to store wine for extended periods.

Simply put, Coravin devices allow you to open and pour a bottle of wine without ever removing the cork. It works by inserting a needle into the cork that doesn’t push cork dust into the bottle.

The device then draws out the wine and replaces the space with argon gas to keep the wine blanketed from oxidation. Invented by Greg Lambrecht, the Coravin system is the only hand-held wine preserver on the market, making it ideal for personal use rather than for commercial use.

But that’s the main drawback of the Coravin to remember. The inventor didn’t design it for use in restaurants and hotels with high volume. He simply invented it to preserve wines for significantly more extended periods than other devices can.

2012 – PRESENT DAY: THE MODERN ERA

In 2012, the notable Visionaire Riccardo Gosi launched Wineemotion with the most advanced wine preserver technology in history.

Wineemotion created the patented ISOL-Plus valve to isolate each bottle in the same system and prevent cross-aromatic contamination of wines, preserving all organoleptic characteristics, such as color, flavor, taste, aroma, and consistency.

One unique characteristic of Wineemotion products is that they utilize both nitrogen and argon gas. The system can accept if one happens to be more scarce. In Europe, wine preservers use nitrogen gas more often than in America; they prefer argon mainly.

But most interestingly, Wineemotion also created the software WineIdea, a platform that sets up the required client-server architecture to connect multiple dispensers to the network with a handful of readily available POS integrations. Never before has so much technology been used to preserve and dispense the wine.

On average, Wineemotion can preserve wines for as long as four weeks, depending on the specific varietal. Recently, Wineemotion USA was the official wine tasting supplier for Expo 2015, an international exhibition of hundreds of different wine dispensary companies.

As wine preservation technology keeps evolving, Wineemotion stands at the forefront of innovation with new ways to dispense the wine.

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