Transcript: EP 10: Wine Preservation Hacks AKA Saving Private Pinot
- [Announcer] On today's episode of "Tasting Natural Wine with Jesse and Aaron".
- Taste it!
- . I don't want to.
- Oh, I mean, not bad. Hello and welcome to the 10th episode-
- Wow. Of "Cellar Rats into Seller Rats" and welcome to our new studio where we've adorned a big-ass snake on our wall.
- It's beautiful. I'm Aaron Inman.
- And I'm Jesse Inman.
- And today we're gonna talk about, Wine hacks.
- This is just a regular bottle, this is a bottle that's been opened for three days, give or take, this is a Coravin, we'll go into that, This is a inert gas which was sprayed into an open bottle and then this is one of the other bottles it was poured into, an airtight bottle to store it, basically simulating the wine the you're not gonna drink til later on.
- There'll be a test on that later. Hey, the main issue is single serving options, preserving wine once you open it. I mean, a lot of times I'll just crush the whole bottle-
- Yeah.
- and then I wake-
- You see, he gets T-Rex arms when he drinks too much.
- Rawr! But then the next day, when I start work around four in the afternoon with creases on my face, I'm like, "Oh, man, that was a terrible decision".
- [Jesse] Yeah.
- My family's upset, my business partner's upset, I'm upset with myself. The reality is that's not the only thing to do is just go ahead and drink the whole bottle. You can use these wine hacks, they kind of mimic a single serving option which the wine business isn't great at. There are 375 bottles, which is a half a bottle. They're okay, they're a little more expensive.
- They're more expensive and basically I want three glasses of them.
- And they don't age that well, to be honest with you, that's been proven.
- Yeah, because the cork's the same size in a big bottle and a small bottle so it's the same amount of oxygen with half as much wine.
- End of the day, the single serving options in wine are not awesome but they're getting better. Cans are helping with that, we might be canning some wine soon. Hm, that's interesting. So, we're going to go into these hacks a little bit more over the next few minutes and you can use these at home to save some leftover wine, especially from Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving's coming up, that turkey's gonna be delicious but you're gonna want to save that grand cru that I'm sure you're gonna have but you're not gonna wanna crush that whole thing with the turkey because the next day you still gotta do the dishes.
- You do.
- All right, so for hack Number One, this is a personal favorite for myself, I use it every other night, not nightly.
- Now didn't you just say your son asked you if you drink wine every night?
- No, he asked me if wine goes with every meal.
- Yeah, which it does.
- What I do a lot of times at home is we open a bottle on say Monday night, get the roast chicken and we do, so, there's a half a bottle left, my wife and I didn't drink the whole thing but it's usually, you know, something we want to save so I have two of these, 187 bottles at home, I think some people call them woozy bottles, you can order 'em on Amazon or different places, they're really cheap, you can pick 'em up at the container store-
- Yeah.
- and so what I do is I simply take the rest of that bottle and I, over the sink, I gently pour it into this 187-
- How gently?
- As gentle as a man can be! And I, I roughly jam it into the bottle, that one bottle into the other bottle, And then I just put it into the I just put the cap on, gently.
- Mm hm.
- And then I put it in the fridge. If you're gonna drink it the next day, not only do you have a nice, basically one glass of wine, single serving, this is about six and a half ounces, something like that, which to me is about a perfect one glass, so you have that for the next night and so it's a great cheap hack. Basically, this costs you a $1.50. If you want a funnel like some employees around our office that are just a little nervous with their shaky hands and so they want a funnel, that's fine, you're gonna be into it for maybe six, seven, eight bucks.
- Yeah, but you'll save yourself a lot of money.
- And you're gonna save yourself a lot of money and it's nice to have that single serving option for the other nights of the week And this'll last in the fridge five days later.
- And key in on the fact that he said, "Put it in the fridge". All of these wines will hold better if you put 'em in the fridge. You'll have to warm it up when you take it out but even though it's a red wine, put it in the fridge, it'll make the wine age slower cause it reacts slower in the cold.
- You know, get your MacGyver on, basically.
- Our next wine hack is Private Preserve, we've been using this for a long time, all the wineries we have worked at, this would always be behind the counter, end of the day, if they didn't want to throw away the wine, this will help keep it a day or two longer. Depending on how full the bottle is and how much you have to spray in there but, in essence, this is CO2, argon-
- Argon, yeah. and nitrogen and so when you're done at the end of the drinking sess, you pop the cork off, put this down there, give it one little toot, two little toots, something like that, put the cork back on-
- I'm tooting right now!
- Basically it just displaces the oxygen. All the gases in here are heavier and so they keep the oxygen off the wine.
- And it can add up. I mean, those cans are about 10 bucks and so-
- Yeah, and it's funny, it feels like there's nothing in here, it's actually lighter than air so it feels you're getting ripped off, but in fact, you're not.
- Yeah, and so it'll last, I mean, maybe a month but about 10 bucks, you can pick 'em up at most wine stores, BevMo!, Google it.
- That's it, we've used it for years and so it's, it's worked relatively well.
- All right, so now we got the Cadillac, big-time baller hack.
- Yeah. This one, as you can see, the cork is still in there and there is, there's wine out of there. That's because the Coravin system allows you to use a needle to puncture the cork as the gas trades places with the wine-
- It basically turns the bottle into a keg. You're pushing the air down and wine out.
- That inert gas is replacing the wine and you're not getting any oxygen on the wine.
- Yeah, whereas the Private Preserve was CO2, nitrogen and argon, the Coravin's, I believe they're only argon and argon's a little heavier and it reacts less with the wine then, say, CO2.
- But at the end of the day, it is expensive. Coravin system, they've got a couple of tiers but like your base model, it's gonna cost you about 200 bucks and then the cartridges, I find them a little cumbersome, the whole thing can be just a little bit cumbersome-
- Yeah.
- but that's just me. So, I tend to not use them, I have one and I don't use it that often. I tend to actually use the hack that we described earlier, the Private Preserve.
- Yeah and I recently bought a Coravin, I think it was a year or two ago, it came with a pack of screw caps so you can put screw caps on top of it. You unscrew your screw cap, put the new one on and you can puncture the membrane-
- Membrane.
- And then that basically turns it into a cork. Maybe not as effective cause you just can take the top off.
- And as we know here, good wine can come with a screw cap, so you want to be able to use your Coravin on those, too.
- So, you mean wines can be made with intention, not pretension?
- Are we gonna jump or we just gonna each other off?
- So to test these wine hacks we are gonna taste the same wine, a 2019 Pinot Noir from Les Lunas, the Berserker Vineyard, which is in Sonoma County, Los Carneros, which is at the southern end-
- Brueske Vineyard.
- Brueske Vineyard.
- That's fine, yeah.
- Okay, what'd I call it?
- Berserker. ♪ Berserker ♪
- So these guys are interesting, they're kind of a little bit more of a natural wine-y, like hipsters-
- [Jesse] Yep, we call 'em hipster wine.
- Hipster wine. Some people have said that we're hipster but I don't, I don't agree.
- No, we're bro, dudes.
- You are a full-on basic bro.
- So, anyways, these guys use low sulfites, which will affect how it stands up to-
- It won't age as long, and also because it's Pinot it's gonna fall off the flavor cliff a lot faster than say Cabernet because it's a lighter wine, doesn't have as much tannin but it does a little bit more acid but, anyway, it's gonna age significantly different than Cabernet.
- It's really an introduction to their winery, we don't know anything about it but it's also a fun way to test these hacks.
- Yeah. So, this is Wine One, we don't know what this is yet.
- We don't know what it is.
- This is gonna be interesting cause it already seems like low sulfite, it's got whole cluster so there's a lot going on in there.
- Yeah, it's all, it already is actually, the fruit is showing a little pruney.
- Oo, and it's fizzy!
- It's showing a little pruney fruit, like a little oxidized fruit, like that kind of like fruit leather.
- Fizzy.
- A little bit like feet.
- [Jesse] In a good way.
- [Aaron] Cause we all like to chew on a dirty sock. It does have a little dirty sock feel to it which pairs really well with cheese.
- Sounds like he's kidding but it's true. Yeah, it's got some fizz which means it was either bottled with residual CO2 in the wine or it wasn't quite finished fermenting yet and it started to re-ferment in the bottle and so the CO2 can't get out and so it creates fizz in the wine.
- And also, it's lean,
- Yeah. you can definitely taste that whole cluster, it is spicy.
- Because this has so much CO2 I would imagine you didn't pour it into a bottle cause that would have scared some of the CO2 out.
- Sure. If I had to guess, I'm thinking that, that kind of oxidated notes are actually part of the wine-
- Yeah.
- not necessarily from leaving the bottle open.
- I'm guessing this is either the Coravin or the unopened bottle, the fresh bottle.
- I was gonna roll with it is probably the Coravin but it could be either one. Wine Number Two, it's funny because the fruit actually isn't smelling as oxidized on this one now, it's a little bit, it's still kinda that cherry fruit but that what I was calling "feet aroma" on Wine One,
- Oo, oo! it's not as funky, but it's like flattened out.
- Taste it.
- I don't want to.
- So, this might, actually might not have been the best wine to pick to do because the hipster wines, as we were saying earlier, they can tend to vary bottle to bottle and this one tastes way different then the other one and I don't think it's because of it being open or not. This one has a very-
- Oo, it's very-
- Microbial.
- It's very microbial.
- Yeah.
- There's a lot of, like, spoiled chocolate, kind of milky chocolate deal.
- Yeah, it's a little .
- Well, it's got that, but it's also got, like, that, like, kind of maybe some referm- like, malolactic ferment in the bottle.
- Yeah, and it's pediococcus.
- Like yogurty.
- Some interesting bugs working on this wine, for sure. You do get that, like he said, with the more of the folks that skew more to the natural wines, they can be a little inconsistent sometimes.
- Yeah.
- And right here, we're experiencing that. Those wines taste very different.
- This one, not enjoying fully. The other one was, I thought it was an interesting wine. This one's, this one's got some weirdness but if you had to guess which one, do you think it's the Coravin? It's still got the CO2 in it, it's definitely got some-
- I'm gonna say this is the open bottle. I think maybe that air allowed it to go a little bit rampant.
- Yeah, maybe so, cause even with a wine with a little CO2, the CO2 in the wine, as it comes out, it's gonna protect it, too, cause it's gonna push all the oxygen up. So, this is an interesting one to do this experiment on. Onto Wine Number Three.
- Okay, so Wine Three smells like Wine One.
- Yes.
- So I think we don't have any bottle variation on this one, so you've got, the fruits a little brighter on this one-
- And there's more CO2 in it. Dude, now that we're talking about it, I think Number Two had to be the open one just cause it was so, so different cause this is definitely more like Number One.
- The acidity on it comes off as a little too sour.
- And it's cause of CO2. I think if you, if you let it sit open, the CO2 would blow off and it'd be less tart cause CO2 is acidic.
- This one, it's hard to peg, I would say because the CO2-
- It's either the Coravin or the fresh opened one and I'm confused between Number One and Number Three, they're very similar.
- And, I mean, theoretically Coravin and unopened bottle are supposed to be very similar-
- Agreed.
- especially for the first pour on the Coravin, the second, this would be the second pour cause we poured out one full glass of that in prep. So, yeah, I think that, I don't know which one is which but I think One and Three are-
- Look how I'm holding my glass, isn't that pretty cool? It's like, "I don't care, whatever".
- Yeah, "Hey, hey, I'm just talking over here, I'm gonna interrupt my brother".
- "But look how cool I am".
- It's fruity, it's a little funky-
- Similar to the first one.
- Similar to the first one. Pretty acidic, low alcohol and that's not a bad thing but it definitely has a leaner mouthfeel because of that. I mean, I've been trying more, some, like, La Touche wines lately and they've been burning me a little bit.
- Well, I mean, if you, if you mass produce a wine and there's that much bottle variation people are gonna get pissed off. Onto Wine Number Four.
- Wine Four.
- I'd say this is in between-
- And it's opened up- Number Two and Three.
- It's like opened up a little bit. That funky-
- Oo!
- I mean, not bad. That is wild, my friend. So, it's either the one you put in the small bottle or it's the,-
- Mwahahahaha!
- Wow, I know. I don't like being super critical, but, cause I appreciate all wine making, but that's rough.
- Whew! Just got my penicillin dose!
- Mm, mm.
- Wow, that's gross! Damn it! Yeah, it's gotta be the small bottle or-
- Wow, wow!
- Oo. Wow, wow!
- Funky. Wow!
- Wow! Wow. Wow!
- [Video Consultant] Dude, there's, no, there's no way that I up, really?
- Uh.
- Dude, Number Two and Number Four were both pretty, pretty woof. Wine Number Five.
- Wine Number Five!
- Yeah, it's funny-
- Brr!
- I hate when people talk about our wines, you know, it's like, it hurts my feelings but our wines don't taste like this.
- We're not talking so much as we're just speaking the gospel. This is what, this is what we're tasting. I mean, nose is opening up a little bit on that one. Small bottle because-
- It's fresher. I really taste it's fresher a little bit. cause it's like, it's opened up, like, but it's still fresh. It's not from the bottle we just had-
- And it does have a little bit of that really wild tannin to it but no where near, like-
- No where near.
- No where near Two and Four.
- Yeah, which it seems like it's been controlled.
- Yeah. I don't know if we learned a lot today other than you want to drink these wines right when you open 'em. This is one where you just drink it all.
- Yeah! No wine hack! Make sure there's four of ya or one of ya's real thirsty.
- Or if you wait a day or two to drink the rest, make sure you really, really like, kombucha. I'm never doing this show again.
- My favorite of the five wines was probably the last one we had. I thought it was a version of One and Three, but more open.
- Mm hm.
- So I'm saying that's the small bottle. So I think Wine Five, small bottle, I think the first wine was either the Coravin or the fresh bottle and Wine Three was the other one of those two, it was either the Coravin or the small bottle. I think Number Two was the opened bottle on the counter, like nothing, and I think Wine Four was maybe the one with just the Private Preserve.
- Yeah, I think the opposite of those last two but...
- Oh, that's, so we did learn a little something from that because we were somewhat on, a little variation, but overall you could kinda, you could kinda tell.
- Obviously the fresh bottle, fresh, the Coravin, fresh and woozy fresh, pretty fresh.
- Pretty fresh.
- Maybe slightly less though, but it's gonna last for several days.
- Pretty fresh, but the oxygen one didn't do shyt.
- No, yeah.
- So, maybe, maybe just invest in a woozy if you want to go the less expensive route on wine hacks for sure-
- Yeah. because that seemed to be pretty good.
- Very interesting experience. Very interesting wine. I mean, that was an intense wine.
- That wine was like dating a bipolar woman. Like, there was elements of it that were really great-
- Yeah.
- and there was elements of it that were a little challenging.
- So, I feel like we've learned a lot here on this episode, both about ourselves, about the wine, wine hacks and basically everything in between.
- Yeah, it was fun, hopefully you guys learned a couple things, I know I did about myself and-
- Yeah, so, a little personal exploration happened today and where we would normally give a shout out to our favorite wine on the exit, we're gonna go with the palate cleansing Topo Chico.
- Always looking for sponsors. See ya on the next episode.
