A few months ago I decided to test if the shifting opinions on Coravin were accurate with an experiment of my own (the prevailing wisdom seemed to shift from “Coravin is great” to “Corvin doesn’t work”). Mid-January, I bought 8 bottles of wine for around $500 and extracted 1 cup (236 mL; 1/3 the bottle) from four of the bottles with a Coravin Model 3 equipped with the standard needle. The other half was untouched until moments before I poured out tastings.
This weekend, I got the chance to run the experiment. I assembled 11 wine drinkers who had no clue what experiment I was running, apart from my telling them I was running triangle tastings. I tracked down 35 glasses and poured 140 tastes of wine (11 people x 3 pours x 4 wines blind and 2 each that my wife and I split non-blind). 10 of the tasters left their score sheets with me and I added my subjective assessment below the results grid.
The four natural-cork sealed wines were:
* 2011 Liquid Farm Wines ‘Golden Slope’ Chardonnay, Sta. Rita Hills (Rita’s Crown / Zotovich)
* 2020 Jean-Marc Burgaud Morgon Cote du Py
* 2018 Saint-Theodoric Chateauneuf du Pape la Guigasse
* 2015 Renato Corino Barolo
**Results:** [https://imgur.com/a/X4rHZax](https://imgur.com/a/X4rHZax)
Of the four wines, only the 11-year-old Santa Barbara Chardonnay (rich, full, med+ acid, very oaked, and strong malolactic fermentation notes) was significantly different after 13 weeks tapped by Coravin. The other wines’ results look like randomness and subjectively + non-blind tasted the same to me. My wife, tasting beside me after pouring, thought she could tell a couple of other wines apart but interestingly *preferred the Coravin-tapped wines* in every flight. With the noticeable difference in the Chardonnay, the Coravin wine simply tasted like it got a little oxygen — maybe 30-60 minutes in a narrow decanter. There were no off flavors and I don’t think you could say one was objectively better, they were just slightly different. The Gamay, Grenache, and Nebbiolo tasted identical to me though on the score sheet I noted that I thought the Gamay possibly had slight bottle variation. The Coravin-tapped Gamay did not taste decanted — like the Chardonnay — just every-so-slightly different to me (non-blind).
So, those are the results. Let me know if you have any questions about the process or results. This was an absolute beast to run blind and probably not something I would repeat.
TL;DR – 13 weeks of Coravin tapping on an 11-year-old Chardonnay was noticeable but not worse (it tasted decanted). All three red wines tasted identical and no one could pick out the Coravin-tapped wines beyond what you’d expect with random guessing.
Dining and Cooking