n
2
Vin
Setup and Operations Manual © 2008
5
These methods only ever offer minimal oxygen exposure reduction in the first place. Each
time you want some wine from a bottle so-treated, you must re-open it and you fully re-
expose the wine to oxygen-rich air – even more so when tilting the bottle to pour! The
larger the liquid surface area exposed to air, the more oxygen is absorbed into the wine.
You get a really large area of wine exposed to inrushing air when the bottle is tilted to
pour: It’s on the order of 42 times the surface area exposure you see in that little 5/8”
circle of wine under the cork. And with these other methods, you repeat that absorption
exposure with every pour!
Any vacuum pump outside of massive industrial & laboratory equipment is only ever
going to partly evacuate the headspace. They don’t get as high as a 50% vacuum,
even, but it’s a handy number for illustrative purposes. 18% of the air is oxygen. Vacuums
do not selectively suck out oxygen. They suck out some of the air. The air that remains is
still 18% oxygen; there’s just less of it. At that 50% vacuum level, after you pour one glass
you will have X# of oxygen molecules still in the bottle. You vacuum. You now have ½ of
X number of molecules in the headspace. You unseal and pour another glass. The
amount of oxygen-rich air in the headspace has now doubled – with the second glass
gone, there’s now twice as much air space in the bottle. You vacuum. You now have (½
x 2) x X number of O2 molecules remaining in the headspace. In other words, after
vacuuming from the second pour, you have the same amount of oxygen molecules in
the bottle as you would have if you’d done nothing after the first glass but simply recork
the bottle! The partial vacuum designs are increasingly less effective with each glass.
Each open-tilt-and-pour cycle adds oxygen into your remaining wine. When learning
wine’s fine points with multiple small-portion samples these short pours are quite
destructive, not only repeatedly increasing oxygen exposure at the surface, but agitating
the wine to assure a thorough oxygen blending! Please see the illustration below.
n2Vin exposes wine to the least possible amount of air – the ½ square-inch surface on the
left. And in this sealed environment that’s all the exposure your wine will see.
Summarily, though you should be able to count on 3 to 4 weeks of preservation with any
wines handled with reasonable care and much longer with most wines, if you plan to
consume a bottle over time for casual enjoyment and/or tasting comparisons, do not
load the system with any wine previously opened and left untreated or treated by inferior
preservation methods. Do not free-pour any wine from the bottle before sealing it with
the n2Vin Bottle Head. And consider flipping the bottle head valve to ON while inserting
the head if you are drinking organics or desire the longest possible preservation window
for your wines.
