It’s become a holiday tradition of mine to stroll along Park Avenue in Winter Park and to stop in for a glass of good wine at the Parkview. When I visited just before Christmas I was intrigued to see that owner Matt Coltrin has added a Coravin to the restaurant’s wine bar.

Are you familiar with the Coravin? I first encountered one in St. Emilion while shopping for some wine to ship back to Orlando. We were seated in one of the many wine merchants in the Bordeaux-region town and faced with several unknown labels, or at least unknown to us.

One never wants to buy a pig in a poke. Especially in an untried wine that you might ship back home only to open and discover that it tastes like a pig in a poke.

It isn’t always practical for the wine shop to continually open bottles just so a customer can have a taste. Once opened, the wine might sit for days before someone else wanted a sample, and by then the air that had entered the bottle when it was uncorked would have begun degrading the juice therein.

So that’s where the Coravin comes in. It allows one to pour a glass of wine from a bottle without removing the cork — or even the foil cap for that matter.

It’s a contraption that clamps on to the neck of the bottle and has a long needle that is inserted through the length of the cork. It includes a CO2 canister that injects the colorless and odorless gas into the bottle to force out the liquid without introducing oxygen. It’s brilliant.

So I was intrigued to see a Coravin sitting on the counter Parview. Coltrin said he limits the use of the Coravin to an elite selection of wines — just as it isn’t practical to open wine bottles willy nilly it also isn’t cost effective to use the expensive device (and the CO2 canisters of lesser wines).

Stop by the Parkview and try some wine from the Coravin — or get something from the regular wine list and ask the winetenders to show it to you. It’s pretty cool.

The Parkview is at 136 Park Ave. S., Winter Park. The Phone number is 407-647-9103.