By Sarah Bagdon
Company website: http://hoststudios.com/
Price: $25

So many wine products out there making pretty bold claims – that we here at WineFoot tend to curb on the cautious side when it comes to those kinds of products.

Host Studios, located in Seattle WA, have a new in-bottle aerator on the market and to our knowledge, it’s the first to market that’s variable – the more you tilt the bottle, the more this thing will pump air into the mix of things.

First off, at least from the female perspective, I love the packaging, it’s small, light weight and rather sexy – in a nice way. But more importantly than that to us winos is that it’s easy to use, in fact, you can use it with one hand – the competition from Vinturi requires two hands as you have to hold their aerator above each glass – rather cumbersome if you ask me.

Of course this kind of product required “extensive testing” (*wink), which meant I was “forced” to taste plenty of wines during the process. Just about every time, (picking blind) I picked the aerated wine so it really does help open up the wines making it an easy pick if you  don’t want to want for a decanter.

Having said all that, there are a few issues I have with it and those are as follows:

- The silicon stopper can move a bit if you transfer it from bottle to bottle which can result in dripping. This, however, isn’t really an issue if you’re mindful of it. I hope future versions of the HOST will address this.

- It can also be difficult to keep clean – notice the red wine residue in the last picture – I found the best way to keep it clean is to always, immediately, rinse with hot water or with white wine.

- Not sure what the folks were thinking when they made the aeration suggestions – here they are straight from the box:

• Steep Tilt: For white wines
• Moderate Tilt: For light-bodied red wines
• Shallow Tilt : For young, tannic red wines

I don’t agree with those suggestions at all – in fact, I’m not sure why they even list them. Wine should be – and is- subjective so I think the end-users should decide how much aeration is right for them. While I realizes theses are simply “suggestions” I also feel they are off-base from even a tasting experience. Normally, most people won’t even decant a white wine and even those who do wouldn’t decant it as long as they would a young red, so this notion of putting the most air into it as possible seems a bit odd to me.

On one hand, HOST did accomplish what it set out to do and that is to make an easy-to-use aerator that’s affordable and can help kick-start young wines, so for that I give them kudos. As far the few negatives I pointed out, I suppose they wouldn’t sway me from recommending it as a viable, easy-to-use aerator.