Review of the Bocavin Electric Wine Opener

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I love reviewing wine accessories that might prove useful to me and my other wine-loving friends. After years of using different types of corkscrews, my go-to corkscrew is a simple double-hinged waiter’s corkscrew. Ironically, my favorite corkscrew was actually a freebie.

I have also used a few electric corkscrews over the years because after all, don’t we want to open a bottle of wine quick and easily? It especially becomes helpful when we may have some issues with our hands that are not able to use a manual corkscrew easily. But out of the electric corkscrews I have tried, none has proven to be that useful to continue using it. I was at a party a couple of months ago and the only corkscrew they had available was an electric corkscrew. It eventually got the bottle open, but I wish I had thrown my waiter’s corkscrew in my pocket prior to going to the party.

When I was offered to do a review on the Bocavin electric wine opener, I first thought I didn’t need to try another electric wine opener, but after looking closer, I realized this one was a different type of opener.

Other electric wine openers have a typical corkscrew that screw into the cork and then you reverse the corkscrew to wind it back out and pull out the cork. Most of the time it works, but it takes a while. The Bocavin electric wine opener is more like a Coravin where a needle pierces the cork and goes all the way through the cork. Pressing the button inserts compressed air into the bottle which the company claims to remove the cork in about three seconds.

Upon receiving the electric wine opener, I realized this was not a typical battery-charged device but instead uses a rechargeable battery that saves cost over its life. The company says the rechargeable battery can open over 50 bottles of wine on a single charge. I plugged the charger in just to ensure the opener was fully charged. A blue light turned on to indicate it was charging. The strange thing though is once the charger is unplugged from the wall socket, the light remained on for a while. I haven’t seen that before.

 

After the wine opener finished charging, it was time to test it out. I inserted the needle through the cork until the opener sat on the top of the cork. I pressed the button, and I could see the cork slowly start to rise and then suddenly, pop! Out the cork came with the loud pop that you often hear when someone opens a bottle of wine with other corkscrews instead of easing the cork out. When I took the Level 1 Court of Master Sommeliers class, we were taught there should be silence when retrieving the cork. After all, if a Sommelier is opening a bottle of wine in a restaurant, you don’t want to hear a loud pop to distract the other customers.

The next task was to remove the cork from the needle. The instructions say to turn the cork first so it’s loose and then pull it off using the cage’s plastic slider. This was a lot harder than it should have been. I have used the opener more times since then and it has gotten easier, but it still is a lot harder to remove the cork than those electric corkscrews that unscrew the cork off. I look forward to version 2 of the opener to improve that.

How did the opener work overall? It is definitely the fastest way to remove a cork from a bottle of wine than I have used before. It is still on the single charge, so the claim of 50 bottles of wine is probably true.

The negatives? I don’t care for that loud pop when the cork comes out, but I can deal with that. It still needs some improvement to remove the cork from the needle. The other item is the instructions say if the cork doesn’t come out in 10 seconds, then use another corkscrew. I did have a bottle of wine that a Coravin needle had pierced, and this opener would not remove the cork. That sort of makes sense since there is a hole in the cork already and this opener’s needle needs to inject air to remove the cork. But the statement would make me think a little because if I have to switch to another corkscrew, I may as well use the other corkscrew in the first place.

What do I use now to open wine bottles? I have switched to the Bocavin electric wine opener because there is simply no faster way to remove a cork that I have found.

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