The TRIbella Wine Aerator is designed to pour and aerate your red wine with both “joy and elegance”. This multi-stream wine aeration device strives to make pouring your wine simple, elegant, and drip free. That’s all fine but let’s see how well it does during a couple evenings with my wife’s Friday night wine club on whether it is truly up to the task.
Note: Images can be clicked to view a larger size.
The TRIbella wine aerator began as a Kickstarter effort back in 2015 that was fully funded, eventually evolving into TRIbellawine.com.
According to Skip Lei, the creator of the TRIbella, his vision was to create a product that not only “open up the flavors of a red wine” but added art to the experience, “as wine is both beautiful and magical”. The TRIbella is supposed to aerate your wine as you pour, but do so in an aesthetically pleasing manner.
The TRIbella wine aerator is nicely constructed from high-quality materials. The TRIbella has a polycarbonate base, stainless steel pouring tubes and rubber bottle gasket, all FDA tested and approved.
As wine aeration devices go, the TRIbella has a relatively small footprint and is packaged/stored in what is more or less a specially designed eyeglass case.
Kind of looks like a spaceship doesn’t it?
As I mentioned above, the premise behind the TRIbella is that in addition to aerating your vino, the manner in which it happens is supposed to be more visually pleasing than the usual/typical aerator. Truth be told, the TRIbella I received did not pour as designed. The picture on the left shows how the TRIbella is supposed to work but the other two illustrate what I experienced. One of the tubes did not pour as well as the others no matter how high I tipped the wine bottle. This flow issue was definitely noticeable throughout my review period. It didn’t really hamper the overall pouring of the wine but did take away from the Zen-like visual experience the designer was going for.
The Rubber to the Road:
In addition to the pouring issue, the consensus amongst the Club members was that compared to other aerators they use, the TRIbella was the least effective at aerating and opening the various wines we tried. We poured multiple glasses of wine from the same bottle using different aerators for each. The vote was unanimous that the Aervana electric aerator or the Aermate wine and spirit aerator poured a better tasting glass of wine. We did this on multiple bottles over the span of several weeks with the TRIbella coming in last place across the board. The final comment from the Club was they prefer a more effective and efficient aerator to one that focuses so much on aesthetics.
Updates 08/17/16
I was sent another TRIbella wine aerator due to the original one I reviewed was flawed and not working as designed. The second aerator did pour as intended, with all three streams of wine flowing in unison. While the Zen-like visual experience the designer was going for is nice, the amount of aeration in the wine remained the same. It aerated the wine well enough but not as nicely as other aerators I have reviewed.
Source: The sample for this review was provided by TRIbella. Visit their site for more information and Amazon to price check and order.
