Leave the cork puller in the drawer, and the cork in the bottle. The Pungo pours wine through the cork via a double-chambered needle, displacing wine with an inert gas, thereby preventing any contact with oxygen. Wines under Pungo stay fresh for months and years. You can leave the Pungo on the bottle, or remove it to serve multiple wines at the same time. Upon removing the Pungo, insert a sealing pin in the cork, which compresses the cork along its length, creating the ultimate seal. 

Optionally, a sealing cap can be placed over the mouth of the bottle, creating another layer of protection. The sealing cap has a special aperature called a "tri-seal" that keeps inert gas from escaping when the Pungo is removed and the sealing pin inserted. These are recommended for long-term storage.

Pungo'ed and pinned bottles can be stored on their sides.

Built to last: Pungos are constructed of aircraft-grade aluminum and 304 stainless steel. Designed and manufactured in the USA.

Pungo: to pierce into (Latin)

At the heart of the Pungo is the needle assembly, which is comprised of six 304 stainless-steel parts, silver-brazed into one solid component designed to withstand the stress of commercial environments. While intuitively it may seem that the large needle would simply push a wine cork into the bottle, an ultra-low-friction coating applied in six layers allows the needle to glide through most corks with very little effort. Further, being able to successfully Pungo a cork demonstrates that it hasn't lost resilience nor grip in the bottle neck, which is a good indication that the closure has remained intact.

The large needle has several advantages. It allows dual channel-flow, where inert gas enters the bottle as wine is dispensed in a smooth laminar stream, which avoids aeration. The choice to aerate your wine should be yours, not the device's. The large needle allows extremely low-pressure operation, on the order of 1-2 psi. Besides being inherently safe, this extremely low pressure prevents the wine from absorbing inert gas during dispensing and long-term storage. The absorption of gas can materially affect the taste of wine, essentially decanting it in the bottle. This can adversely affect older, more fragile wines.

Attaching a high-pressure gas cartridge to a glass bottle necessitates a safety-minded approach. The Pungo includes several safety measures, both inherent and explicit:

• As mentioned above, the large-diameter needle allows for low-pressure operation, 1-2 psi. This is important because standard wine bottles are NOT designed to contain signficant pressure.
• The gas-delivery mechanism is made of aircraft-grade aluminum and 304 stainless for safe, trouble-free operation.
• As the Pungo trigger is deflected, the wine port opens before the gas port, ensuring that gas is never introduced into a sealed bottle.
• The wine port in the needle is situated below the gas port, which means that if the wine port hasn't made its way through the cork, (which can happen if the cork is pushed into the bottle to a certain extent) the gas port will also be embedded in cork, unable to introduce gas into the sealed bottle.
• The Pungo includes a precision-machined pressure-relief valve (PRV) that will vent excess pressure in the gas circuit. The PRV will reset itself automatically. This safety can be checked by placing your thumb over the gas port and pulling the trigger, in which case you should hear gas escaping from inside the housing. Perform this safety check from time to time.
• If all else fails, the Pungo does not lock onto the bottle, leaving the cork free to pop out.

We supply three types of inert gas: nitrogen (N₂) (with a fraction of argon (Ar) mixed in - 11.6% by volume), pure argon (99.99%), and food-grade CO₂. For wines and spirits, we recommend N₂. Some of our customers prefer CO₂ for white wines, which helps to keep these wines bright and crisp.

One thing to keep in mind when putting wine and spirits under inert gas is that these liquids readily absorb gases that aren't already in solution. For example, an unopened bottle of wine has essentially zero percent dissolved oxygen (O₂). Any O₂ that made it into the bottle during filling, and over time as ingress through the cork, will have reacted with sulphur dioxide or the wine compounds. This is why a bottle of wine opened to the atmosphere will immediately start absorbing O₂. Contrary to popular belief, reactions with O₂ take time - hours to days, but absorption can happen quickly, especially if there's agitation.

N₂, the largest component of the atmosphere at 78% by volume, is inert at room temperature with respect to wine, and remains in solution at a saturated concentration from the time the wine is a grape to when it's fully matured in a bottle. The only way to get more N₂ into solution is to increase its partial pressure and/or lower the solution temperature.

Argon, on the other hand, only constitutes 1% of the atmosphere, which means that it is not normally found in solution at any significant concentration in grapes. Argon sparging is rare in winemaking, which means that most wines have essentially no concentration of dissolved argon. So any argon introduced into a bottle of wine, will be soaked up like a sponge, increasingly so as the pressure increases. While it’s true that argon does not react with wine compounds due to it being extremely inert, dissolved argon can soften older more fragile wines, essentially decanting the wine in the bottle. This may or may not be desired.

This is why we prefer N₂ to serve and preserve wine. Simply put, N_2, in concert with the Pungo’s low operating pressure of 1-2 psi, does the best job of leaving the wine's delicate chemistry intact.