Wine preservation systems, which keep your favorite bottle of vino nice and tasty for a longer period of time so you can enjoy it well after that first night you pop it open, range from the rather bizarre to the really high end. Falling somewhere in the upper-middle of this echelon of wine gadgetry is the really well thought out and cool looking Oxbox “wine on demand” system that’s handcrafted from a self-described “basement winemaker and lifelong tinkerer.”
Oxbox’s inventor Tristan Martin, looking to create the better wine preservation mousetrap, toiled away in his garage as he called upon tools and techniques from various disciples in his life to make this gizmo that is said to prevent wine oxidation for weeks at a time. It was tested for two years before coming available from Martin for $695 a pop.
Why The Oxbox Rocks
How does it work you might ask? Pretty simple, really. You pour your nice bottle of pinot noir or cabernet into its interior reservoir, “evacuate any oxygen with a quick and easy patent-pending process,” and enjoy a glass of wine at your pleasure from the built-in tap dispenser.
What’s particularly nice about Oxbox, besides the fact each unit is built from sustainably harvested American black walnut, is that the reservoir which holds your wine is designed to be reused hundreds of times. It is made from the same material that’s the standard in the boxed wine industry and, as far as cleaning it goes, that’s a simple task of a warm water rinse if you plan not to immediately refill it with another bottle of wine after the last liquid content is fully drained. Pretty much everything about it is food-safe, bpa-free and pthalate-free as well, which is yet another major plus.
Both red and white wine can be stored in its equivalent one 750 ml bottle capacity at a time, according to Martin, though if you put the latter in you’ll want to make sure to refrigerate the container to keep the wine chilled since the Oxbox doesn’t have that feature built-in.