Vacuum Wine Corker

The the purpose of this project was to minimize oxygen and achieve longer shelf life on fruit wines. One trick commercial folks use to increase shelf life is packaging under a vacuum. I have been using a vacuum pump for racking wine/ starting a siphon therefore some of the hardware already existed. It looked like it would be easy to produce a home scale vacuum corker. Basics: The work which corking tools do is to compress the cork slightly and then push the cork into the bottle. Corks which are available in my local store (Nomacork) are 22 mm diameter by 38 mm high. The neck of a wine bottle typically has an inside diameter of 18.5 mm. Several designs of home style corkers push the cork through a cone to compress it so that it is smaller than the bottle’s opening. The steepest corker cone I have tried is one I call “double lever” going from a 32 mm to a 15 mm diameter in a 70 mm high tube. A fairly shallow design cone is the “mini corker”