Today's Throwback Thursday offering was published for members yesterday. Coravin, the new wine access system that has proved especially useful for serving glasses of fine wine without pulling the cork, announces that they are about to resume sales after experiencing difficulties with the odd exploding bottle, as described in Coravin halt sales.
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) officially approved their corrective action plan (CAP) of supplying all customers with a protective sleeve like those illustrated to put over bottles. The idea is that would contain any broken glass in the (relatively rare) cases when defective bottles break under pressure from a Coravin appliance. This fast-track decision by the CPSC means they will be able to resume shipping Coravin systems in the US. They also announce that 'in Canada, Health Canada is accepting the CAP as well. In the EU, the authorities concluded that the Coravin system was low risk and no corrective action was required – but we will voluntarily implement the US plan on a global basis.'
They are hoping to ship sleeves to all of their existing customers over the next two weeks and plan to start selling to new ones in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Hong Kong in the second week of July.
They say they are aiming to launch a fully fledged sales operation in the UK and France by October (at the moment everyone has to order from Coravin in the US), with other countries to follow.
See the relevant CPSC statement here. I am passing this on not because I am a Coravin user myself but because I know not a few wine professionals who have already found the Coravin very useful. This applies particularly to those serving fine wines by the glass in restaurants and wine bars, but also, as reported by Nigel Greening of Felton Road in New Zealand in this thread on our forum, wine producers going off on a sales trip who are able to check the condition of cork-stoppered bottles before departure. No need for spares.
Many Purple Pagers expressed enthusiasm for this new contraption both on that thread and on this earlier thread so I thought you would be interested in the next chapter of the Coravin story.
Meanwhile, if you're planning to use a Coravin on a magnum, you're on your own...