Equipment Review – Champagne Saver

By : Stuart | 1 Comment | On : March 19, 2010 | Category : Equipment

Champagne lovers have a reason to rejoice over this Champagne Saver & Pourer from Vacu Vin. I picked this up as a stocking stuffer for the sous chef over the holidays. We have only one true champagne drinker in our house. This often lead to a good portion of the bubbly stuff going down the drain when the bubbles disappear. For a while I bought splits to reduce the waste, but the varieties were very limited.

I was at first skeptical about this device’s claim. Our testing has proved me wrong and with proper use this worked as advertised. As of this writing we can verify that this will keep your champagne with bubbles in it for at least 4 days. We may run a longer test and see where the break occurs however that is probably also dependent on the quantity of liquid remaining in the bottle.

Now for some hints and tricks on this device. You need to push the stopper firmly into the bottle to make it work. Next I will warn you that you should always store this in a vertical position. I made the mistake of putting this horizontally in the wine holder in our refrigerator. I grabbed it by the neck and the stopper shot right out at me. There I was soaking wet with champagne and a very messy floor and refrigerator to clean. I think this happened for two reasons; 1) I had probably not firmly seated the stopper in the bottle, and 2) the motion of grabbing the bottle pushed liquid and compressed gas on the end providing some additional energy. So keep it vertical and you should do fine.

Of course you can pass on this device and put the saving towards a bottle of champagne. That way you can still say “Honey, if we don’t drink it all tonight it will just go to waste”. Probably not so bad if two are drinking the bottle.