Tiny Wine lets peasants try out wines the billionaires are quaffing
Ever wondered what a £1200 wine tastes like? These wine boxes let you find out
If like us your budget for wine is usually constained to what’s on sale at Aldi or Sainsbury’s, you might be interested in Tiny Wine as a way to sample how the other half live. Or, to be more accurate, the other 0.05%.
It lets you try wines that might cost hundreds of pounds a bottle, while spending much less.
There’s no magic here. You just get a 100ml sampler of each — a little less than a standard small glass measure at a pub (125ml).
Tiny Wine uses Coravin tech to make sure your sample bottle tastes just as good as it would had you just pulled out the cork from the actual bottle. This system uses a needle that pushes argon gas into the bottle as it punctures the cork, to make sure no oxygen comes into contact with the wine itself.
It’s used in fancy restaurants that want to be able to offer high-end wines by the glass.
Tiny Wine currently offers three taster packs, each comprised of six 100ml samples. Up to two whites, four reds. The cheapest is £72.99.
The headline-grabber is the most expensive pack, dubbed Bordeaux Somm, which costs £339.99.
Oddly enough, it includes the same two (relatively) affordable whites as the base pack, but also features a 100ml hit of Château Margaux 1990. A bottle costs upwards of £1200 online at present online. It alone accounts for a big chunk of the tasting box’s cost, even if the rest are significantly more affordable.
The samples are presented in little glass bottles, which Tiny Wine says are fine to be kept for up to a year.
Tiny Wine transfers the wine from the original bottle to these little ones using a Coravin Vinitas system, which is designed for precisely this kind of job. The company claims to be the first to offer such pricey wines using this method to us plebs.
Is it worth spending a small fortune on wines small enough to make it difficult to share them even among a couple? Sure — you'll have to ask your tastebuds for the answer to that one. But who wouldn’t want to see what a £1200 wine tastes like?
