Enomatic Wine Dispensers

Back in Manchester, I just visited a fairly new wine bar called Salut, located on a corner near the Town Hall. It’s an attractive bar, airy and industrial, where you can buy wine by the glass, bottle, or through four enomatic wine dispensers. To access these machines, you get a (free) card at the bar, top it up with money, and insert it into the machine whenever you’re ready for a wine. My sister and I put £80 on our card (there’s a reason we put so much money on, which will become apparent shortly), and settled down to taste our way through a choice of thirty-two different wines.

These machines work by replacing wine taken out of the bottle with inert gas, which protects the wine remaining in the bottle from oxygen. This means that the wine stays fresh for some time after being opened, enabling multiple pourings over the course of several days. In essence, Coravin works in much the same way, with the advantage of being portable and easy to use at home. The latter is becoming widely used as it allows sales reps, restaurants, and winery tasting rooms to share expensive bottles without wasting leftover wine. Meanwhile, the enomatic machines are increasingly popular in bars and wine shops as a means of giving customers a taste of a wide range of wines that they may go on to buy. It’s also possible to choose between 125ml or 175ml servings if you’re looking for a glass of wine rather than a sample. One final advantage, especially for shops that specialise in retail rather than service, is that customers help themselves to the wine rather than relying on members of staff.

At Salut, we tasted seventeen of the thirty-two wines available, from nine different countries, and at a range of prices (£15-£100 a bottle). The wines at the cheaper end of the scale were fairly run of the mill and not that exciting to taste, though they do provide a good by the glass option. It’s with the more expensive wines that the machines come into their own, as they allow you to taste wines that often aren’t readily available to those without a thick wallet. Two wines from Spain’s Ribera del Duero really stood out: 2010 Flor de Pingus (£7.15/50ml//£89.50/bottle), from one of the region’s top producers, and 1983 Vega Sicilia Unico (£25.40/50ml), one of Spain’s most iconic wines and the reason we topped our card up with so much money. £25 for a 50ml shot of wine is of course expensive, but we were – or more to the point I was – unable to resist trying a vintage 32 years old, most likely a once in a lifetime opportunity.

 
After that build-up, the wine itself was a disappointment. It was heavily oxidised, its tannins had fallen away, and, although the acidity was still remarkably fresh, the red fruits were faded. Tasting the wine raised two of the disadvantages of the enomatic machines: how long can they actually keep a wine fresh and should they be used to serve a wine that’s more than thirty years’ old? Putting to one side the question of whether the Vega Sicilia had been stored properly before the shop bought it, I feel a wine as delicate as that should be opened, decanted, and drunk straightaway, before it has time to oxidise. For that reason, wines of that age are always going to have a scarcity factor if they are to be appreciated at their best. 

With both the enomatic wine dispensers and Coravin, there seems to be an assumption that the wines will last indefinitely once opened because they’re protected by inert gas. That’s certainly not true with Coravin – once the bottle is half empty, it should be finished off as it’s impossible to insert enough gas to continue protecting the wine. This may also be true of the enomatic machines, as I had to send one wine back – a Mendocino Chardonnay – that had come from the end of the bottle. A member of staff assured me that it being the last pour should make no difference, but in tasting the wine from a newly opened bottle the difference in the wine’s freshness and vibrancy was noticeable. Personal appreciation and understanding of a wine is more important than faith in a machine.