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Comment by alaxsxaq | Hacker News Reader

Who keeps a bottle of wine around long enough to bother worrying about oxidation? If I was opening a very expensive bottle, I would invite people over to share it. Most wine I buy to drink or cook with costs $10-$20/bottle. Hardly worth making any effort to preserve it if I forget to drink all of it in a few days time - worst case, I toss half a bottle or mix it into some salad dressing.

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>"Who keeps a bottle of wine around long enough to bother worrying about oxidation?"

Restaurants and wine bars who sell high end wines. These Coravin type devices have enable people to order expensive Burgundy or Barolos etc by the glass which were previously not offered by the glass as the unit economics weren't there. It's been a real boon for wine aficionados and wine bars alike. Also wine reps reseal bottles with gas as they generally pour glasses for their accounts and then put the opened bottle back in their trunk for the next account to sample. You would not reseal a $10-20 dollar bottle of wine.

Even those that serve lower end wine worry about it. (Our max bottle is $14ish wholesale). I run a brewery that also serves wine and our bottle loss is a significant enough percentage of our total wine sales, because of our low throughput. It commonly happens that a bottle goes "bad" with only 1 pour from the bottle thus returning a loss on that bottle.

Even with the bottles that leave two pours, at expiration, we are making a few dollars but not enough to keep the lights on.

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