À propos du projet
Aeration of Wine
Remember that food with no salt or the one where you accidentally dumped salt twice? Well, oxygen is to your wine what salt and pepper is to your food. Too little is too bland, too much and you spoil it.
Wine Whisperer is a portable wine aerator, a convenient and compact way to spice up your wine. Based on proven sparger technology that gently aerates the wine after it has been poured into the glass.
Wine Whisperer is very easy to use: Just squeeze the bellow as many times you like. 4-5 times are sufficient in most cases. No batteries needed.
"The Point of No Return"
The moment you pour a glass of wine, most aeration methods are impossible to use. Swirling and waiting has been the only socially acceptable way to aerate a glass of wine. It works - but very slowly.
You don’t have to wait anymore!
Decanters are often very charming pieces of glassware and they do work - but not very efficiently. Oxidation takes place in the zone between wine and air and that zone is not really very big in a decanter. That's why you often need to decant a wine hours before drinking it.
You can hyper-aerate the wine by putting it into a blender. It's fun to do (and every wine lover should try it at least once) but it's very difficult to dose the correct amount of oxygen.
Wine Whisperer fills the gap in the existing field of wine aerators by speeding the aeration process without compromising the control of it.
What is a Sparger?
When a gas has to be mixed with a liquid quickly and efficiently (for example, adding carbon dioxide to water to make sparkling water), a sparger is the best technical solution.
A typical sparger consists of a sintered metal rod. Sintered metals come in different pore sizes and porosities. Pouring gas (in this case: atmospheric air) out of pores creates bubbles - the smaller the pores, the more the bubbles.
Bubbles have an optimal ratio between surface and volume. So, the smaller the bubbles, the larger the contact zone between wine and air and the higher the rate of oxidation.
The final Wine Whisperer's filter cup will look like the filter in the center but with the size of the smaller filter cup to the right.
The design process
We wanted to make a compact no-nonsense product that was portable and could be used without breaking any (unwritten) social rules.
Also, to serve the frequent air travelers, we wanted a 100% drip-free product for you to enjoy your wine without stains on your shirt.
This idea quickly became a design for a multi-functional bellow that acts as an air-pump and has a protective cover and a foot for it to stand firmly on a table: The sparger is simply a sintered filter cup press-passed onto a stainless steel rod.
The bellow will be made of an odor-less food grade silicone. The sparger will be made of a stainless steel alloy (316L), and the valve will be a high-grade type used for medical devices.
The major part of the design process went into optimizing the thickness and details of the Wine Whisperer. We 3D-printed a few different versions to check dimensions.
The flexible materials available today for 3D-printing are very brittle and can't be squeezed without leaking through cracks - they also have a pretty coarse surface finish. This is why we can't show a Wine Whisperer actually making bubbles (in the video we used the prototype with a standard bellow from a medical device).
We milled down an existing filter cup to get the size we wanted and thus rugged look of the tip surface. The final product will have a smooth surface with a seamless interface to the stainless steel rod.
Cleaning Wine Whisperer is a breeze: Just pull out the sparger from the bellow and rinse it with water.
What we will use the money for?
We need to invest in the tooling to make the two bellow-parts. We also need to build a tool to get the sintered stainless steel in the exact dimensions we want without losing a nice looking surface. Finally, we need to fulfill the minimum order quantities.
Time plan
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Praça São Lourenço in São Paulo for letting us shoot a part of the video there, to Séverine for the (very!) French voice-over, to Flávia for her photogenic hands, and to Ulrik for his help with fine-tuning the design.
Risques et défis
We work with three suppliers on this project:
The supplier of Spargers: They manufacture spargers in sinter-metals and attach them to the sparger rods by press-passing. They will have the full responsibility for delivering a finished Sparger and a firm quote is already in place.
The supplier of Bellows: We have a prior working relationship with the supplier. They make good quality bellows at a reasonable price and have knowledge of assembly and packaging.
The supplier of valves: These valves are mostly used for medical devices and these guys know what they are doing.
A few other factors may influence:
Currency: We wished you could back the project in US dollars but the bankers tell us that you need to back the project in Danish Kroner (DKK). Currencies are very volatile these days.
Our Team: We have done quite a few of the Kickstarter projects - and only one has had a severe delay due to technical issues where we had to adjust the design as well as address quality issues in production. These things take time to sort out but all backers ended up getting their products. It's not a shop and unforeseen event can and will happen. Till date, we have been able to solve all the issues in the projects we have undertaken.
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Période de financement
- (30 jours)