All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Once I was buying a birthday card for someone who didn’t have a very good sense of humor, and I was in a shop that included a wine kitsch section: Wine O’Clock wall clocks, a “This Is Actually Wine” coffee mug, stuff like that. There was a large etched wine glass that read, “When the bottle is half empty, the glass is half full.” The implication: Things are better when there is no wine left behind.
This is a sentiment that isn’t just shared by the makers of oversize wine glasses, though. Serious wine people often peg the life span of an opened bottle of wine at somewhere between two and five days, at which point you’ve got to finish it or toss it because it’s gone bad. As Epi digital director Maggie Hoffman noted, there are enough wine-saving contraptions on the market to fill their own section near the Wine O’Clocks. There are stoppers and pumps, but in the world of winemakers and sommeliers, the gold standard for wine-saver products is the Coravin. It basically allows drinkers to dispense wine through a needle without ever removing the cork from the bottle. And sommeliers and wine writers have told me that in their experience, the Coravin can keep a bottle of wine fresh for months, maybe even more than a year. But it’s also big, expensive, in need of pricey argon canisters (which it uses to displace any oxygen in the bottle), and, frankly, kind of ugly. It’s a great tool for restaurants and a good one for solo wine collectors, but the average person who doesn’t want to drink a whole bottle of Cabernet in one sitting should have a simpler solution. That’s the promise of the Savino wine carafe.
The Savino is a simple, pleasant-looking carafe with a silicone rimmed top and float that always sits level with the wine. To use it, just insert the float in the empty carafe and pour a full bottle of wine into it. When you’re done drinking for the night, pop it in the fridge to better preserve the wine. The Savino operates off the same theory as every wine-preservation gadget I’ve ever seen: keep the wine from coming into contact with oxygen. As I drank a bottle over the course of a week and watched the float, it appeared to keep a reasonable seal. The Savino works better than other stoppers that go directly into the neck of a wine bottle because those stoppers leave additional space for oxygen as wine is poured out, and it’s easier to use than pumps that suck that air out because...well...you don’t actually have to pump anything.
The test, though, was always going to be: How does the wine taste? I poured half a bottle into the Savino and kept the other half simply recorked after drinking. I used a pretty tannic red, which was likely to last longer than say, a delicate Pinot Noir, to give the non-carafed wine a better shot during this test, but after four days the difference was clear. While the recorked wine never went sour or sherry-like, it did go rather flat. The wine in the Savino kept its tannic bite and the pronounced cherry notes it had on the first day.
I won’t say the Savino is a must for every wine drinker. There are plenty of people out there who, like the novelty wine glasses want them to, don’t end a night until the bottle is empty. But for those who need a wine saver, it will keep unfinished wine ready to drink for a week better than lots of other products that make that claim, and it will look good while it does.
