I guess you won’t need a spoon anymore to keep your champagne from going bad …
Everyone knows that champagne in an open bottle the next day will hardly have retained its fresh taste and sparkle. The situation can be made good by closing the bottle with a special cork for sparkling wines and, understandably, putting it in the refrigerator. This will give the wine a few more days, but one way or another, the quality of the drink is still diminishing. With a sparkling and weak aroma of champagne, full enjoyment will not be possible. If you forget about this bottle and it will last longer and exhale, the drink will have to be poured at all.
Dmitrijs Sinkēvičš
Noble Wine Bar chef sommelierWith mild wines, this situation, when they need to be stored longer, has already been solved with the help of a vacuum device or Coravin system, but it was not clear what to do with sparkling wines. True for a while, most wine drinkers with out a doubt – used a spoon placed in the neck of the bottle to supposedly reduce the loss of carbon dioxide. Fortunately, this myth was overturned by Professor Gérard Liger-Belair of the University of Reims in a series of practical experiments.
Now Zzysh and the machine of the same name offer us a much more effective method.
Manfred Jüni
Manfred Jüni is a young businessman from Switzerland who, since childhood, helped his father pick grapes and was aware at that time of the incredible value of nature and natural features and the importance of being able to preserve it all. He began researching the field of product preservation and, as a wine enthusiast, extended it to wine. In this way, in 2009 he created an open-air canning facility and has been working tirelessly since then. Over the years, the machine became smaller in size, more efficient, and more and more convenient to use. Today, Manfred has invented a system that allows the wine, both still and sparkling, to retain its taste and aroma properties for up to several weeks after opening, and this device fits completely in the jacket pocketair of the University of Reims in a series of practical experiments.
How to use Zzysh?
1. The stopper must be firmly inserted into the neck of the bottle.
2. Zzysh is applied to the cork extension with the canister inserted.
3. Then lightly press on the cork for 3-5 seconds. The cork then remains in the bottle.
4. Even after several weeks, you can enjoy the freshness of the wine by uncorking the bottle.
It should be noted that as soon as you remove the cork Zzysh from the bottle, the effect disappears and all manipulations must be repeated, if the wine is to be stored longer. As a rule, each individual bottle will need its own stopper.
Through the cork, the device pumps argon into the bottle, and because argon is heavier than air, it displaces the air, creating a neutral environment for the wine where it does not oxidize. In addition, no vacuum is formed. Depending on the amount of wine in the bottle, the pressure can be extended if more free space needs to be filled with argon. It is considered that one cylinder can suffice for eight standard pressures. Argon is an inert gas, completely neutral, does not react with wine and is absolutely harmless to health. This is the third (in quantity) component of the air we breathe.
It is worth recalling that this system keeps the wine in the state it is in at the time of corking, so the sooner Zzysh is used after opening the bottle, the greater the wine’s potential. And, of course, you should not neglect the temperature regime, it is better to store the bottle in the refrigerator – it will help prolong the life of open wine.
Sparkling wines will need a special cork Zzysh Champagne and a separate gas cylinder, because a mixture of argon and carbon dioxide is used to preserve sparkling wines, not only to keep the wine fresh, but also to provide enough pressure to keep the bubbles. All other processes take place directly whereas with still wines, only the cork needs to be fixed to the neck of the bottle with special fasteners so that the pressure, which can reach up to four atmospheres, does not shoot the cork.
Our experience
As they say – trust, but check, and we Noble Wine tested this equipment in operation.
We opened one bottle of champagne and one bottle of red wine and immediately corked them again using Zzysh. We left the wine in the refrigerator for two weeks. After this wait, we removed the bottles and opened two more of the same new ones for comparison.
A practical nuance has been revealed – if you want to use Zzysh for still wine and sparkling at the same time, you will need two sets of equipment, because each type of wine must use different gas cylinders, but when changing a new cylinder in the plant, the seal is lost.
We had no doubt about the result with red wine, as our long experience with Coravin had already shown that argon retains it perfectly. In one such experiment, we opened a bottle of Vina Sastre Ribera del Duero Crianza six months after we had used the Coravin system and discovered that the wine felt wonderful. Of course, this result may not always be, it may vary depending on sterility, use and the wine itself.
And so, after tasting two samples – one stored with Zzysh, the other just opened, we could hardly notice the difference between them.
However, red wines, due to their properties, survive such manipulations better than many white wines, especially – sparkling. Overall, the wine was perfectly preserved, as this was a relatively simple test. Sparkling was a more convincing indicator in this case.
When we opened the pair of champagne bottles, we first appreciated the play of bubbles in the glasses, which was, however, a little more pronounced in the freshly opened wine. In terms of aroma and purity of taste, the wine did not actually lag behind its opponent after the use of Zzysh, although it had a slightly lower intensity. One way or another, but it was hard to believe that the bottle had been uncorked two weeks ago. If it had not been expected for so long, the effect would probably have been even stronger. However, with different types and styles of wine, the efficiency of the plant will vary. For example, champagne will obviously be able to retain more flavor and bubbles compared to prosecco, simply because there are more bubbles in the champagne from the beginning.
For our team, this device was an extremely useful discovery, which would be useful to every wine enthusiast. When everyone expresses their different views on wine at the family dinner table, you can treat everyone with a glass of exactly the wine they prefer. At home, guests can now have a vertical tasting, including sparkling wine. Until recently, this seemed completely impossible. Obviously, you can now taste a glass of champagne for something special, without waiting for the occasion and without surviving on the preservation of the drink. However, there are wines when you want to enjoy them in a glass in the best traditions of hedonism, leaving the rest for later.
