Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/46939
at Chrysler's concept car division and had every machine and tool imaginable necessary to complete such a weighty feat. Rio explained Bernoulli's principle to Nelson—as the velocity of a fluid increases, the pressure within the fluid decreases—and described the design of a venturi which applies this principle. "So I left Larry with his gadgets, hoping that we could make this idea work," Sabadicci continues. A week later, Nelson called Sabadicci and his ears were met with the delightful and distinctive whirring sound of his new aerator, the Vinturi. The next task the pair encountered involved determining the aesthetics of this state-of-the-art aerator. Nelson recruited Alan Barrington, a lead- ing concept car designer at Chrysler. Barrington presented him with more than twenty various designs. "I was almost ready to say, 'Can you go try again?'" recalls Sabadicci, "but then one design caught my eye. I pointed to the current Vinturi shape, and Larry pulled out a full-color rendering of the Vinturi with the black band next to a bottle of wine with a glass and a cork. I fell in love with that picture as soon as I saw it." While it may seem like it would be smooth sailing from there, the manufacturing process proved to be anything but simple. After being told that making the desired design would be impos- sible, Sabadicci searched for eight months until a manufacturer finally said he would be able to produce a mold in three months and could release a product after a couple weeks of testing. Four months later, a mold was made, and finally, after eight months of testing, the Vinturi Red Wine Aerator was released in 2006. In the years that followed, Sabadicci experi- mented and perfected three other innovative Knowing very little about wine, Sabadicci asked about the reasoning behind the aeration process, amazed that each glass of wine tasted significantly better than the one that preceded it. What had started as a thin, mediocre sipper had transformed and blossomed into a rich and creamy fine wine that had improved with each new pour. A passion had been ignited. Trained as an electrical engineer, Sabadicci had found a niche designing software for Macintosh computers. In his spare time, Rio began to experiment with aeration. "I did a lot of different things with wine," Sabadicci recounts. "Since I didn't know wine, I didn't have any respect for it. So I tried all kinds of crazy things in order to aerate it. I had gone down two different paths, neither of which led to what I thought would be a good product." About to give up, Sabadicci happened upon a website that detailed the beer-making process, which explained that running the beer through a venturi yielded a better-tasting product. "That's when the lightbulb went off," he recalls. "I thought, 'Ah, venturi! That's Physics 101. I know venturi.'" (For those non-physicists who don't know venturi, it's a short tube with a tapered middle that causes an increase in the flow rate of a fluid passed through it, creating a suction effect.) After an unsuccessful attempt at creating his own venturi, Sabadicci visited Larry Nelson, a creative genius who worked products: the Vinturi White Wine Aerator, the Vinturi Travel Aerator and the Vinturi Spirit Aerator. Each precision instru- ment fulfills its specific function by varying the thickness of the internal mechanisms by thousandths of an inch, allowing each type of drink to reach its full potential. Through his brilliant innovation and ambitious vision, Rio Sabadicci has created the quintessen- tial accoutrement for any bottle of Malbec or Islay single malt, "air-lifting" wines and spirits to a whole new level of excellence. For more informa- tion about Vinturi go to www.vinturi. com. The aerators are $39.95 each and make outstanding and memo- rable holiday gifts. november 201 1 / the tasting panel / 7