Wine and oxygen have a complicated relationship. A little can help a wine open up. Too much, and things go downhill quickly. Here’s how we keep the good stuff tasting exactly as it should.
What happens when wine meets oxygen?
Opening a bottle starts a clock. As soon as oxygen gets to the wine, it begins reacting with the compounds responsible for its aroma, flavour and structure. At first, this can be useful. Giving a wine a little air can help it open up in the glass. Leave it too long, though, and you start heading in the other direction.
Fresh fruit becomes less vibrant, aromas become muted and the wine can begin to taste flatter and less precise. Eventually, those lovely flavours you bought the bottle (or tube) for start disappearing altogether.
And sadly, there’s no undo button. Once a wine has oxidised, you can’t put the freshness back in.
That’s why the way we move wine from bottle to tube matters quite a lot.
So, does wine taste the same from a Tiny tube?
That’s the idea. Simply pouring wine into a smaller container wouldn’t do the job. If we exposed it to oxygen along the way, we’d just be creating a very stylish little tube of slowly oxidising wine.
Instead, our wines are transferred and sealed using Coravin Vinitas, which allows us to fractionalise wine in a controlled environment while keeping oxygen exposure to a minimum. The preservation comes from removing oxygen, not from the tube magically making wine last longer.
So when you open a Tiny Wine, you’re tasting the wine we selected from the original bottle, rather than the tired remains of something that was opened several days ago. This is crucial when you’re tasting wines side by side; you want to compare the wines themselves, not which one happened to meet the most oxygen first.
Are some wines better suited to small format?
Yes, although the good news is that a huge range of still wines can work brilliantly in small format when they’re handled properly. Some wines are naturally a little tougher than others.
Structured reds tend to be particularly resilient thanks to things like tannins and phenolic compounds. Fortified wines are hardy little things too, helped by their higher alcohol and the way many of them are made - all contributing anti-oxidative properties.
Whites can vary more. Delicate, highly aromatic wines need particularly careful handling because some of the compounds responsible for those bright, fresh aromas are more fragile. More textured and structured whites tend to be naturally more robust.
But that doesn’t mean we only put big reds into tubes. Far from it.
At Tiny Wine, we work with reds, whites, rosés and fortified wines from all over the world. The important thing is understanding each wine, handling it properly and making sure it reaches you in the condition it should.
Same wine, different format
The whole point of Tiny Wine is that the format shouldn’t get in the way of the wine.
We want you to be able to open a tube, pour it into a proper glass and concentrate on what matters: whether you actually love what’s inside.
Because trying wine before committing to the bottle only works if the sample does the bottle justice.
