Enomatic dispensers under argon, and it solves the single biggest problem in the wine trade
Vagabond on Charlotte Street holds a 4.6 from six hundred and eighty people, charges ten to fifty pounds, and you pour your own wine from a machine.
Which sounds like a gimmick and is solving a genuine and very old problem.
The problem
An open bottle of wine dies.
Because oxygen gets in, and Acetobacter eats the alcohol and turns it to acetic acid, and within a few days the wine is on its way to vinegar.
Which means a bar that offers wine by the glass is taking a risk on every bottle it opens.
Which is why the by-the-glass list is short and bad
And it is not the venue’s fault.
Because if you open an expensive bottle for one glass, and nobody else orders it, you have thrown away most of a bottle.
So the by-the-glass list is limited to the things that sell fast – which means the safe, the cheap and the popular.
And the interesting wine stays in the bottle, and is only available if you commit to seventy pounds.
What the machine does
It blankets the wine in argon.
Which is an inert gas – it does not react with anything – and it is heavier than air, so it sits on top of the wine like a lid, and the oxygen cannot get to it.
And the wine is drawn out from below.
Which means an open bottle stays drinkable for weeks rather than days.
And that changes the economics entirely
Because now the venue can open anything.
The rare thing. The expensive thing. The obscure grape from a hillside in Sicily that nobody has heard of and nobody would ever risk a bottle on.
And it can sell you a taste of it, for a few pounds.
The Prat’s oenological desk regards this as the most genuinely democratising piece of technology in the drinks trade, and notes that it does something no sommelier has ever managed.
It lets you find out what you like without having to ask.
Which matters enormously
Because asking makes you the person who asked – and that is, across eight postcodes and a thousand and eighty-five articles, the single most powerful force in British consumer behaviour.
People will not name a budget to a sommelier. People will not ask about corkage. People will not ask for a top-up.
And a machine does not judge you.
Verdict
Excellent, strong number.
Go, and taste six things you cannot pronounce.
The second cheapest bottle
Which the machine also abolishes, and which is the oldest trick in the trade.
Nobody orders the cheapest, because ordering the cheapest is a statement about yourself in front of the table.
So they order the one above it.
And the restaurant, knowing this perfectly well, puts its highest margin there.
The second cheapest bottle on a great many wine lists is the worst value on the page.
And a machine has no second cheapest bottle. It has a wall of things, at a price per measure, and you can see all of them at once.
The layer of specific knowledge could only come from working in dysfunction or obsessively studying it.