In late August, I grabbed a bottle of our stand by Dominio de Eguren Protocolo `08 $7.99 ***(*) and by day three with the Wine Shield, it was still great and I declared the Wine Shield a success. It really is such simple technology, a food grade barrier that floats on top of the wine and protects it from oxygen and oxidation.

I wanted to REALLY put it to the test, so last week I grabbed a bottle of another standby Almez Garnacha and started trying to see what the outer limits of the Wine Shield would be (I hid the bottle in the baking cabinet to try and avoid finishing it on the first day). By day three, the garnacha was good to the last drop. (oops – so much for testing longevity. This is why I am not a scientist – No impulse control. Oh, and the math…)

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Winestate Magazine conducted the 2011 Australian and NZ Wine of the Year Finals during the week 4-7 October 2011 in Adelaide culminating in a Subscriber Tasting at Australia’s National Wine Centre.

The wines judged were the Top 400 from over 11,000 wines submitted. These Top 400 had been awarded the 5 star Gold or 4.5 star Silver Medals during the year.

Wines were sampled by judges then protected with the “Wine Shield” for the duration of the week leading up to the tasting at the National Wine Centre.

At the Subscriber tasting (after the wines had been protected by Wine Shield for up to 4 days) the 200 guests (including over 100 wine professionals) enjoyed the wines with no negative comments noted.

Again, Wine Shield has proven to be an incredibly cheap, simple and reliable wine preservation system!

Click here to see a copy of the Press Release

There’s a new way to preserve wine. It doesn’t require rubber corks or vacuums. It can be inserted right into the bottle. This new preservation system is called a Wine Shield and comes to us from Australia. Recently the folks at Wine Shield were kind enough to send me a sample so that I could share my experiences with you.

The shield itself is a flexible plastic disk about as big around as the inside diameter of a bottle of wine. The edges are frayed and there are air pockets to keep the shield on top of the wine.

How It Works

Once you’ve poured a glass or two from a freshly opened bottle of wine you insert the shield using a special fork provided with the shields. The shield unfolds itself on the surface of the wine. Floating on top of the wine surface it creates a barrier keeping the good stuff in and keeping oxygen out.

My Experience

Upon receiving the sample package I opened a bottle of wine I had on hand, poured a glass, and inserted the shield. It was easy to get the shield in place. At first I was worried the shield wouldn’t unfold, however, after a minute or so it flattened out.

When pouring additional glasses of wine with the Wine Shield it never impeded the flow of wine. It just floated around on top. Once you set the bottle down again the shield covered the entire free surface again.

I stored the wine in the refrigerator and had one glass of wine per day for five days to see how it would age. For the first two days there was little noticeable change in the wine. I could really tell I was drinking from an open bottle by the fourth day. By the fifth day the wine was pretty tired, as I would have expected from any preservation system.

Conclusions

I can see a lot of potential for the Wine Shield. Its the perfect solution for dinner parties, restaurants, and wine bars. Servers can just pour and go. No fumbling around with vacuum pumps or rubber corks.

The only “issue” I had was putting what looked like an open bottle of wine in the refrigerator. This is purely psychological on my part. Every time I opened the fridge I could hear my parents voice reminding me to close open containers!

Because the shields are not reusable you’d have to have a stash of them on hand. As someone who doesn’t keep an open bottle around very often I’d have to pay attention to my supply.

The Wine Shield is a viable alternative to vacuum systems and it’ll be interesting to follow their progress as time goes on.

*While I was provided a free sample to review I was not compensated in any. The opinions in this post are my own.*

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Got wine left over that just can’t be consumed? Have a bunch of partial bottles left over after tasting party? As many know, you can’t just put the corks back in and expect the wine to be much good later on.

This is because exposure to oxygen in the air can ruin wine in a day. Oxygen quickly combines with many of the ingredients in wine that provide flavor, effectively destroying (oxidizing) them. People in the winery business are keenly aware of this problem and take extensive precautions to make sure that their storage containers containing wine worth $1000’s doesn’t get trashed.

There are many ways to do this. Suck out all of the air from the container, replace the air with a type of gas that will not affect the wine, or you can place a plastic film right on top of the liquid that is left in the bottle. Dozens of wine-saving products are available to consumers today, but they don’t all yield the same result.

Over the past 10 years many inventors have been hard at work perfecting ways to save a good bottle of wine from spoiling. And it looks like the inventions will just keep coming. One of the more recently introduced products is the “Wine Shield” by Wine Preserva, Inc. It’s basically a plastic disc that you insert into the partially finished bottle, allowing it to float on the remaining wine to keep the air out.

Here’s how it works. Because the disk is flexible, like a circular piece of bubble wrap, it can easily be shoved into the bottle where it expands and drops on top of the liquid This makes for a very easy to handle alternative to the more commonly known gas canister.

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What do you do when you open a good bottle of red and just cannot finish it? You want to preserve it of course, and now there is a new, inexpensive way to do it. The kind people at wine Shield recently sent me a sample and I, being a single drinker, wanted to give it a try.

The wine shield is an actual food-grade plastic disc that you insert in the bottle that covers the surface of the wine. They claim it will reduce oxidation for up to 5 days and it can be used on red, white and rose wines.

Here are the results of my experiment:

I decided to use a bottle of rich, full-bodied Cabernet Sauvignon for my little experiment.

Villa Hermosa 2007 Napa Valley Cab Sauvingon

Day 1
dark purple almost opaque with a clear rim
nose: kinda funky with hay,anise, blueberry and other dark fruits
palate: tannins are strong, long linger of blueberry and cassis, rich and concentrated (great wine for $15)

Day 3
everything was the same. Not surprising as most wines can stand up 3 days with just a cork and refrigeration.

Day 5
On Day 5 I opened the same bottle of wine to contrast it with the wine that had been open.
wow, the two bottles are almost the same. Just as fresh (more of an herbal note than before), tannins about the same and similar richness on the palate.

**I would recommend the Wine Shield as an inexpensive way to make that open bottle last longer. Seems like an ideal alternative for a wine bar where they sell wines by the glass.**

Click here to read the complete review

If you’re like me, it is a rare day when we have leftover wine. Actually, that’s not entirely true – I often have leftover wine. Until the next day! If you’re not like me however, and you need to preserve your wine for a day or more, and protect it from the elements, you might need a way to keep those flavors in tact as you work your way through the bottle.

I recently had the chance to try a new wine preservation system, The Wine Shield. This oddly strange looking device literally covers the wine in the bottle, forming a barrier to the air that can damage (ok fine change) the wine.

I will admit, when I first got the package I was skeptical. I am a VacUVin user, and have been since I started drinking wine. I couldn’t figure out how a system that doesn’t take the air OUT of the bottle was actually going to work.

How does it do it? Well, these clear plastic disks, just slightly thicker than saran wrap really, are packed up neatly in a sleeve. YOu insert them in the bottle with a special dohicky and if all goes right – it deploys and lays flat on top o the wine, preventing any oxygen from getting to the surface area. Essentially, it’s a clear, disposable cork.

Did it work? Actually, yes. It did work. I left a bottle open (but corked) for three days, and tasted it along the way. While it wasn’t as fresh as a daisy on the third day, it was definately better than just leaving the cork in. At $10 for a pack of ten, it’s a buck a pop to preserve your wine.

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Like most wine bloggers, I regularly receive offers of wine samples, books, wine trinkets, stemware, different accessories like wine stain removers, aerators, and even a tchotcke that supposedly ages wine in just a few minutes (only imparted a metallic taste for me). As a natural skeptic I tend to view all wine trinkets and accessories with a jaundiced eye.

Recently a company called Wine Preserva, an Australian firm, contacted me about trying their wine preservation product, the wine shield — a thin plastic disc that, when inserted into an open wine bottle, creates a barrier between the wine and the outside world thereby reducing oxidation and keeping the wine fresh for consumption over the course of several days.

There was a time in the not too distant past when an unfinished bottle of wine was an unknown phenomenon in our house. Now, with a newborn, my wife and I rarely have time (or, um, energy) to enjoy a full glass, much less finish off an entire bottle in a night or two. It’s routine for a bottle of wine opened here at Chateau Morgan on a Friday night to last well in to the next week.

Although I am happy with the vacu vin and argon gas system we use at home, the wine shield interested me because I’ve been looking for a practical, travel-friendly alternative to my small vacu vin to preserve wine while I’m on travel. In the past, when I was traveling nearly every week, I would pack a small vacu vin and bottle plug to keep a bottle of wine drinkable throughout the week at the hotel.

Since the wine shield appears to be travel-friendly — small, thin, individually wrapped — and claims to preserve the taste and nose of a bottle of wine for up to five days, I was looking forward to testing this product.

I conducted three rounds of testing with the wine shield just to complete this experiment. I scrapped the first experiment due to a technical problem with the wine shield disc. The second attempt ended prematurely due to over-consumption. The third and final round — a more controlled yet-far-from-scientific test with two bottles of the same wine — was completed without operator/experimenter error or technical problems.

Conclusion: The wine shield is simple, easy to use and is travel friendly. Most importantly, it works (well, at least as far as I’m concerned from my less-than-scientific testing). I could see this product being placed for sale in Vino Volo airport wine bars and/or in airport and hotel shops.

Since the wine shield is intended to be a single-use product, and ranges in price from 60 cents to $1 per use (depending on quantity purchased), the price seems reasonable when used to keep a $20+ bottle of wine. Not sure this makes sense to use for that Tuesday night $8 bottle.

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The first time I tried them out was a few weeks ago when my wife was out of town. I opened a bottle, and wanting to be able to tell her I was responsible and didn’t drink the entire thing by myself in one sitting, I pulled out one of the Wine Shields and proceeded to insert it into the bottle after pouring myself a glass.

The second time I tried this was last night with a bottle of wine, and I can say that I got the Wine Shield in much better this time, so clearly the learning curve on these things is short, and I think if I used one every night I would soon be a deft pro at it.

While the wine didn’t last all night, I put one in as my wife was going to be late and I didn’t know how long the bottle would have to be opened for, including to the next day. The bottle didn’t last, but I was more pleased with how quickly I was able to pick up inserting the Wine Shield.

So the big question is would I recommend the Wine Shield?

For me personally no. My reason for that is that bottles of wine at my house rarely last more than a night, so I have small use for preservation systems at my home. That being said. When I did use it to preserve a bottle it worked admirably, and this is definitely something I would have been interested in when I was bartending.

If you work in a restaurant or you don’t finish bottles of wine in a single night then I do actually recommend the Wine Shield. After a couple of tries it’s easy enough to get into the bottle, and the fact that it’s disposable is an added bonus, especially if you plan to take it on something like a picnic or camping trip so you don’t have to worry about forgetting a piece at home.

There are a lot of products out there that claim to preserve your wine, but I can say that this one does deliver, so you can buy with confidence if that’s what you’re looking for.

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After 4 days, I got the 2 bottles and Platypreserve out and poured a glass from each. The wine from the corked bottle with no WineShield was slightly darker than the other two, and had a more oaky nose to it. Upon tasting, it was clear that the oxygen had affected it slightly, but it was still drinkable. I then tried the glass from the Platypreserve and determined that it would be a great product for going camping if you’re going to drink the wine within a day or two, but it definitely did not keep the wine fresh for 4 days. The wine that had the WineShield in it actually tasted like it did the first night we drank it…I have to say I was impressed! Who would have thought such a small little thing would help keep the wine fresh! Essentially what it does is create a physical barrier instead of a gaseous (eg. argon/nitrogen/CO2) one between the oxygen and the wine.

This was a fun experiment, and I was surprisingly impressed with the product, so if you like to drink a bottle over a couple of days, I would recommend it. A pack of 10 can be ordered online for $7.50.

Click here to read the complete review