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Comment by guidedlight | Hacker News Reader

This bit was interesting:

“ If you want a longer shelf life, you can buy your own canister of inert gas, and spray that into the half bottle (or even the full bottle) to displace the oxygen. These canisters aren’t cheap, and there’s no real way to know when you’ve sprayed enough gas into the bottle, so most people overshoot out of an abundance of caution, and they don’t end up being great value for the money.”

It probably depends on the gas that is used. Argon is probably best, because it’s heavier than Oxygen. So a even small amount should form a seal just above the wine.

However, gravity’s effect on any gas will be minor.

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I use such a product (Private Preserve) and it works pretty well. I think it is mostly CO2 and Nitrogen, with a smidge of Argon.

I don't drink much wine so I have bottles in the fridge that have been there up to a year. When using the gas, I think the decay is more related to how often the bottle is opened and poured. So a bottle that I gas-treat after the initial opening seems to be happy to sit for quite some time. Subsequent treatments are not as effective.

It doesn’t work that way because of Brownian motion. Plenty of oxygen will unfortunately contact the wine if only a little argon is there.

How about burning the oxygen with a small flame inside the bottle?

I want to see the schematics for whatever device you design to make this happen.

I imagine a dirt-cheap 'wand lighter' would do just fine for this purpose. Stick it in the bottle, click, it'll burn out in a couple seconds.

and you prevent the air rushing back in, how?

C02 is heavier than air, so... probably somewhat easily. If it's "rushing back in" at a truly significant rate, it probably wouldn't burn out.

It's not going to be perfect, of course, you're only burning things - tons of oxygen is left over, it's an imperfect process on its own. Achieving a perfectly-deoxygenated environment isn't the goal though, extending the wine is.

Interesting idea. “Smoke taint” is a very negative characteristic of wine, so many sommeliers will react negatively towards the idea of any flames near wine.

But if the combustion particles can be controlled, there’s no reason this wouldn’t work.

Sounds like an innovative idea!

Perhaps use hydrogen gas as the fuel, and the only thing you'll get from the reaction is a little bit of H2O, no fumes. And you can generate the hydrogen by electrolysis in an external device powered by a battery.

I can imagine exploding bottles and some ‘memorable’ dinner parties.

There has to be some flame-lessly oxidizing material that could be used?

What about hand warmers? If you had one hanging inside a bottle would it use up all the oxygen?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_warmer

> Air-activated hand warmers contain cellulose, iron, activated carbon, vermiculite (which holds water) and salt and produce heat from the exothermic oxidation of iron when exposed to air. They typically emit heat for 1 to 10 hours, it usually takes 15-30 minutes to start to heat up, although the heat given off rapidly diminishes after 1–2 hours.[5][6] The oxygen molecules in the air react with iron, forming rust. Salt is often added to catalyze the process.

Good idea, but they are quite expensive.

I wonder if there exists an oxygen "getter" suitable for this purpose. ("Getters" are reactive materials put into vacuum systems which react with specific types of expected contaminants, like oxygen, water, or carbon dioxide)

There's a product on the market that claims to absorb oxygen, called Repour. I haven't tried it since the cost per use is higher than I'd like.

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