Is this $60 stopper what champagne’s been waiting for?

No sound is more representative of carefree extravagance than the popping of a bottle of champagne. The small-scale explosion of the cork coming out, or perhaps flying across a room, is the ultimate signal of the start of a celebration. It’s a brief rush of luxury, but also the first step down a path of no return. The bottle has been irreversibly opened, and everything in it must be drunk.



But despite a centuries-old bottle design that resists resealing, there are times when, actually, it would be quite nice to put that cork back in and save the rest of a barely touched and very expensive bottle of bubbly.



It’s this deviling quandary that has consumed the last two years of Aaron Trotman’s life. He’s the founder and CEO of Non , an Australia-based brand of nonalcoholic natural wines that specializes in carbonated varieties. He’d seen so many partial bottles of his product wasted after going flat—both in high-end bars and in his own home. He set out to find a way to properly seal opened bottles of Non’s sparkling wines, which retail for $30, so that they could last for days on end.



[Image: Non]



After two years and a close collaboration with Sydney-based Vert Design Studio , Non is releasing the Non Stopper, a streamlined marriage of stainless steel and food-grade silicone that simply latches onto the top of a bottle of sparkling wine, including those from brands other than Non. With no mechanical parts or pumps, it forms a self-pressured seal that can keep an opened bottle of sparkling wine carbonated for around seven days.



“We didn’t make it for ourselves. We made it for all sparkling bottles,” Trotman says. “We wanted to make sure that it was universal.”



[Image: Non]



The Non Stopper retails for $60. It’s not the only product on the market, and it’s far from the cheapest, but Trotman says almost every other sparkling wine bottle stopper out there relies on mechanical parts that create a suboptimal seal and are prone to being knocked open accidentally.



“I couldn’t count the amount of times I’ve heard someone pulling a bottle out the fridge and it’s popped off in a restaurant or in a bar or even at home and the wine’s wasted when I was planning on saving it for the next day,” he says. “The current systems and the mechanical levers just weren’t really getting the job done.”



A sample Non Stopper sent by the company proved effective over several days of testing. Its clawlike form makes it easy to slide onto the top of an opened bottle, but with just enough resistance to show that its fitting snugly. A day and a half after first resealing a bottle of the company’s stewed cherry and coffee variety, I reopened the bottle to a loud “fffft” of carbonated air releasing. It could have been the same sound the bottle made when it was first opened. Another seal break five days after the initial opening was similarly robust. Trotman says the maintenance of freshness is dependent on how much liquid is left in the bottle, but he’s had two-thirds-full bottles of Non that have stayed fresh under the Non Stopper for more than two weeks.



Trotman says the design evolved through six variations over the two-year design process before landing on a form factor he says is inspired by space-age design. (An image shared by the company compares it to futuristic buildings from The Jetsons.) Several prototypes followed, and each was put through a barrage of tests to ensure the seal would last over the course of at least a week. “It took so long because it had to be so precise,” Trotman says. “The moment you changed one bit on the metal then the rubber didn’t work, or vice versa. It was just all these points of a millimeter.”



[Image: Non]



Though there are machines and sensors that could measure how the level of carbonation changes over time, Trotman says the company opted to rely on taste-testing rather than hard numbers. “Most consumers or people in the trade would be going off mouthfeel,” he says.



Testing also took into account the stability of the stopper itself, with the goal of having it stay on and airtight on the way home from a night out, for example, or in a bag on the way to a picnic. As a veteran of the roadwork involved in selling to restaurant and bar managers, Trotman knows a poorly latched seal can be a wet mess in the back of a car. “Bags are wet at the bottom, and all the business cards I’ve got for the day are soggy,” he says. The Non Stopper was tested to ensure it could hold when rattled or rolled around in car trunk, or shaken on a bumpy road. Trotman recently put the Stopper to the test on a sales trip in the U.K. “We gave it a good hammering,” he says. “I was very pleasantly surprised.”