All indications are that alcohol consumption is on a downward trend. For some, that means swapping boozy beverages out entirely for non-alcoholic beverages, but for others, myself included, that means simply drinking less frequently.

Enter what I call the Prosecco Problem (the “Champagne Conundrum” wasn’t alliterative enough). When you open a full-size bottle of bubbles but you and your partner only intend to have one drink a piece, you’re left with a few choices: Change your plans and just finish the bottle off in one night, attempt to preserve any leftovers for later, or, most unacceptable of all, dump what’s left. Sparkling cocktails can be even more of a challenge because they use even less wine per drink.What’s a weekend Aperol Spritz drinker to do? What if I don’t want to throw a whole aperitivo party just to make sure no Prosecco goes to waste?

Coravin

Sparkling Wine Preservation System

Somewhere along the line, I acquired a cheap, sparkling wine stopper. It’s a simple mechanism that kind of seals the uncorked opening with a spring-loaded rubber disc, and wings that clamp down under the lip of the bottle to keep it snug and in place. After a couple days though the contents of the bottle become noticeably flat.

Then there’s Coravin, the wine preservation system that, in its original iteration, used a needle to puncture a bottle’s cork in a way that let wine out and pumped argon gas in to preserve what’s left. It basically let you open your wine without opening your wine, keeping it good for years. Coravin followed that innovation up with the Coravin Sparkling system, which can’t puncture the cork under so much pressure, but instead acts as a replacement clip-on cap, pressure-sealed with CO2 charges to keep the contents fizzy and fresh.

Coravin has the technology, but it also has a high price tag, $399. So I ran a little spritz experiment, pitting the basic cap and the Coravin Sparkling against each other to see if the fancy system, designed for preserving high-end bottles of Champagne, significantly outperformed the stopper for the more pedestrian use of making a single household’s sparkling cocktails. Would using it let me enjoy more (and better) spritzes from a one, reused bottle?

Adam Campbell-Schmitt