Customer Review: ETO Wine Preserver

I happened to come across ETO on kickstarter about two years ago and my interest was super peaked. I am an avid user of crowdfunding websites, so I decided to back them. After about a year worth of delays my wine preserver came on 09FEB19.

I am all about useful and clever wine products; however, about 95% of all the products on the market are not well made, not practical, or don’t really work.

For wine preservers you basically have 4 options on the current market (I define freshness as when the wine starts to lose its flavor).

  1. Use the original cork. That will give you have about 1-2 days of freshness before the flavor starts to go down hill. Cost: $0.
  2. Use an inert gas. They come in a similar can of that of your compressed air keyboard cleaners. They will give you about 3-5 days of freshness (depending on how skilled you are in using the product) Cost:$10 (~120 uses, much lower in reality).
  3. Vacu Vin saver or similar product. They give you about 3-5 days of freshness. Cost $10.
  4. Coravin system. It will keep your wine fresh for about month. Every puncture or resinsitertin of the needle you are letting in a tiny amount of air. Cost $200-$350 (plus refills cartridges cost)

The Vacu Vin and Coravin have dominated the market and you have likely seen them in bars, restaurants, and wineries all over the country. They work well and I personally use the Vacu Vin. The Coravin system is an amazing product, but out of the price range of average person. As you can tell, there is a huge price gap between the two, and that is where ETO comes in.

ETO is a UK based company and fills the gap (literally). It also doubles as a wine decanter. There is also no gas refills and simply pushes the air away from the wine. The secret to their design is a ball like objects that lets air by but, as soon wine touches (in the upright position) the ball it pushes it up and seals in the wine. The design is very similar to to an anti-siphon gas tank check valve.

I have put ETO through the gambit of tests and here are my findings. YOU HAVE TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE USE. It is simple to use; however, it is not intuitive. Also, it took me along time to find the instructions (they are in the top of the packaging). It also comes in copper or stainless steel.

Does it work: I deem it partially effective, it will keep your wine fresh for about 3-5 (they advertise 7). Cost: for me on kickstarter it was $76, but will likely retail for $100-$115 (has yet TBD).

Disclaimer: I contacted the company on several occasions with the faults I discovered with their product for some explanations. After a few attempts they did get back with me, but did not acknowledge my request for their testing results from Beacon Laboratories at Bangor University Wales UK. They also said I might have a faulty seal and that they were sending one to me that day in “the post”. It never came.

Pros:

  1. Simple elegant design
  2. Doubles as a wine decanter
  3. Truly drip free pouring (works amazing!)
  4. Simple moving parts
  5. No physical force to use like pumping

Cons:

  1. The glass bottom is easily breakable. They provide you coaster, but that is just a band aid. I see myself break this on my kitchen granite countertops at some point in the future.
  2. Cleaning. Like anything in wine. You must clean everything that touches your wine to make sure it doesn’t affect the flavor. I recommend cleaning after each use. That is a full break down of all it parts.
  3. There is always some air still left in ETO due to the surface tension of the wine, which is a major flaw. The amount of air is determined by the user and how skilled they are and slowly pushing down (left and top right picture below).
  4. You can’t lay it on its side in your fridge.
  5. It also doesn’t push down far enough to save your last glass of wine, so it forces you to finish it (that may not be a con for some of us).
  6. Only works for the 2-3 glasses of wine.
  7. On very few occasions the wine leakes by the ball seal and sits open to the air until you pour from it again and it mixes with the wine in the ETO (bottom right picture).

Unfortunately the ETO doesn’t work exactly as advertised, and it isn’t super intuitive. You’ll have to pay close attention to how you push – I recommend the Will Smith Hitch Method (hold the neck and push 90%, then push the remaining 10% with your two thumbs fast).

$100 is a bit too rich for me as well. The ETO isn’t really a high end product, and it’s too expensive to be a low end accessory. You will likely start to see ETO for sale on their website or in small wine stores around the USA, but it’s not the major breakthrough product I was hoping for. The amount of care and cleaning (careful: don’t break the glass bottom!) prevents this from being a weekday tool at any price. After 5 months of testing I can tell you this niche product is no better than a Vacu Vin (or similar product). 

They did another campaign on Indiegogo, so I’ll chalk this up to one of those crowdfunding efforts seeking to make a quick buck. Come for the revolutionary wine experience – leave with an overpriced bottle decanter.

Check out my latest review of an awesome wine preserver that actually works: http://steppingintowine.com/index.php/2019/12/11/customer-review-wine-squirrel/

Featured image sourced from ETO wine Facebook page

16 thoughts on “Customer Review: ETO Wine Preserver

  1. I used the ETO preserver for several weeks and have to admit the wine stayed perfect for 3 days. (Who keeps an open bottle longer?).
    But, while cleaning the glass decanter I dropped it and broke in many many pieces. Looked on their website and ordered a replacement. With shipment, from Europe, it cost me $50! My bad but an expensive replacement for a small glass container.

  2. I’m Winelover in South Korea. After buying it a few days ago, I kept the wine for about a week. I feel seriously bad because it smells like rubber. I don’t know if this smell will go away after a few uses, but if all the wine changes like this way, there’s no reason to use this product.
    It’s a waste of money.

    1. I’ve had the same disappointment: rubber taste and smell.
      We organised a blind tasting with the same wine from the same bottle poured out in a 375ml bottle and in the eto. After one day, both tasters could easily discern which wine was best preserved and which wine had an off odour of rubber.
      I found out on the JancisRobinson.com forum this inconvenience should disappear after heating up the two silicone parts (the red silicone ball seal and the black silicone glass seal) on a baking tray in the oven for 20 minutes at 200 C° (400 F°). The seals are pure food-grade silicone so won’t melt. Really curious to repeat my former experiment…

  3. Unfortunately the wine picks up the rubber smell. I have written Eto and they were kind enough to replace the rubber sealing. But also with the silicon parts the wine smells and tastes like rubber already the next day. This makes the Eto useless: the choice is between oxidized wine and wine with a disgusting rubber smell. I have tried to keep the rubber parts in wine for several days. Also, as recommended by the Eto team, I have dried the rubber in the oven for 20 minutes. Both witbout success. Finally, I gave up and my two Etos have ended in the closet. The idea is great but unfortunately the product in this shape is not ready for the market.

  4. I’m an experienced wine collector with a large passive wine cellar, drinking almost exclusively French wines (Bordeaux, Burgundy, Southern Rhone, etc.) I have now used this device with approximately 10 different bottles over the last several months. I haven’t really detected a rubber-like taste in the wines I have stored, however the device doesn’t seem to preserve wine at all, over simply putting a stopper into a partially empty bottle and then placing it into the refrigerator. I have also placed the filled ETO device in the fridge.

    The device looks good, however it is much easier to pour wine from either a bottle or a regular decanter. I have found no benefit to using this product, I have not found any reduction in expected oxidation over time, and to my taste any dry wine will be virtually undrinkable on day 3 when it’s been stored in this ETO device. I find the same thing with wine left in a partially empty capped bottle in the fridge.

  5. I am a very recent sign up to Vance’s blog. Am a passionate good red wine collector and drinker and have been at it for the last 40 years, mostly bordeaux and napa cabs and blends. Am retired and in a two person household. A bottle is too much now and it lasts for anything from two to maybe ten days depending. Have tried everything over many years to preserve the newly uncorked “fragrance and freshness” of a fine bottle. Until four or five years ago, nothing worked. Day 2 is ALWAYS downhill on day 1. Day 3 is mostly undrinkable and has to be dumped. Tried various vacu vin savers, corks, decanters, fridges. For a good wine, nothing has been any good, always disappointed – same result, drink it all on day 1 or lose it, especially if the bottle was down to or past half. Then along came Coravin. Life has been perfect ever since. I have no fears leaving really good bottles with a couple of glasses out of them for several weeks and have done so many times. Great for comparing really good vintages without having to open and lose the whole bottle(s). Can’t say anything bad about it except I go through a lot of argon canisters and have to buy them in bulk (one argon lasts two-three bottles).If you leave the bottle pressurised with argon, there is no deterioration over any period of time that I have tried.
    Then for Xmas 2020 my son gave me an ETO. Wow, what a disappointment. After three bottles I am about to dump it (without telling son). Wash wash, all these parts, difficult to seal, a couple of times impossible – it got stuck, rubber taste, restrictions on when it gets down to low volume. Its an over complicated overpriced gimmick. I have nothing to do with either company, but I’m always sitting with a Coravin “open” (has had a needle in it) bottle of fine red, sometimes I will have two or three great reds that I’ve had a glass or two out of each with no fear of them going off. Cant do that with an ETO. Freedom, that’s how life should be. I can depend on it, no messing around, so easy to use and its always there to let me drink a great wine even though I only want one glass or maybe two out of a bottle in an evening. I thought your review of it was not my experience of using it over several hundred bottles.

    1. My “capacity” is greater than what you report for yourself 🙂 Nonetheless, I sometimes end up in situations where a full bottle is to be “opened” and it will not be consumed. If I think that the remains will be consumed the next evening, then I just open the bottle, and once whatever is to be consumed has been consumed, shove the cork back in and put the bottle into the fridge. Most wines will survive a day after having been opened, partially consumed, and recorked then refrigerated. Beyond a day we are speaking diminishing returns; I seldom like any wine that was opened 2 days before and that was recorked and refrigerated.

      Like you, I have a Coravin (actually have a couple of them, one in each of my houses). This is not a perfect system and the capsules are expensive if you use them to actually “dispense” wine. I would never use them to dispense more than 375 ml out of a 750 ml bottle. More commonly I’ll use them to dispense about 1/4 of the bottle. The next time, which has never been as much as a month later, usually a few days, I’ll pull the cork. If the bottle isn’t finished in that setting, then it gets recorked and refrigerated, then finished the next day.

      With that approach, I’m only “dispensing” maybe 1/4 of a bottle of wine with argon gas, and the balance is consumed either the next time when the cork is pulled, plus perhaps a bit more the next day.

      I also look at the price/quality of the wine that I’m opening before deciding to give it the Coravin treatment. At current prices there is very little costing less than $25 that I would even consider using the Coravin on; most commonly it is on bottles costing $50 or more. At the high end, I wouldn’t use the Coravin at all. Although I haven’t detected a decrement in quality in wines exposed to the Coravin system, I would be loathe to open a real “cellar treasure” worth hundreds of dollars using a Coravin. Instead, I would drink it with a friend or friends and consume it in one sitting.

      I think that the Coravin system can be used economically if you choose to do so. This is how I use it.

  6. I’m so disappointed with this! My wife bought this for me as a Christmas present, great idea as I love wine, what a disappointment and a rip off! Doesn’t work, Doesn’t enhance flavor, Doesn’t work! Don’t waste your money on this rubbish! In the recycling bin.

  7. Thanks for the honest review, and also for all the comments. Could you please review the QikVin. It seems to be a very promising device. Thanks.

  8. Beautiful but infuriating!!!

    I’ve had one of these for a few years (as has a friend), however as nice as it is to use most of the time, there’s some kind of issue with the seal and even my replacement last night became as incontinent as a muddled nonagenarian, literally emptying over the dinner table a very nice Primitivo. As this is the replacement seal and that my friend has the same issue, my guess is, looking at the fact they have disabled reviews on Facebook, that there’s an issue they’re trying to suppress and are just looking to make sales.

    They have yet to respond to my email and the last time I dealt with Eto to get a replacement seal, it was as rewarding as a trip to the dentist!!!BEWARE!!!

  9. Beautiful but infuriating!!!

    I’ve had one of these for a few years (as has a friend), however as nice as it is to use most of the time, there’s some kind of issue with the seal and even my replacement last night became as incontinent as a muddled nonagenarian, literally emptying over the dinner table a very nice Primitivo. As this is the replacement seal and that my friend has the same issue, my guess is, looking at the fact they have disabled reviews on Facebook, that there’s an issue they’re trying to suppress and are just looking to make sales.

    They have yet to respond to my email and the last time I dealt with Eto to get a replacement seal, it was as rewarding as a trip to the dentist!!!BEWARE!!!

  10. I recently bought this and thought it was a great idea and it arrived over 14 days ago. What a disaster. I cannot even lift the leaver despite asking two strong men to do so . It ‘s completely faulty and in a vacuum I think. I have been in touch with Eto wine for two weeks now trying to return it and get my money back . That in terms of customers service is an even bigger disaster and not concluded yet. I wish I never bought this and with the service so bad I see no way this company can survive. Buy it at your peril

  11. I recently bought this eto wine decanter over two weeks ago. It arrived and was faulty. I just could not open it by pulling the spout upward and the top was loose also. I have been in discussions with Etowine to return this formally and I am still waiting for this to happen despite 6 e-mails and no refund yet . The customer service is appalling and obviously the quality check is questionable in production . Buy this at your Peril it’s got a way to go

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