The World's Biggest Wine Preservation System

Behold the largest wine store-and-pour system in existence, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The massive winekeeper is located at Panorama Wine Bar in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It works by pumping nitrogen gas into the bottles, displacing the oxygen that the bacteria that spoil wine after you uncork it need to grow. The bottles are also held at a constant temperature, which is good for keeping wine tasting fresh.

Though the system has been in use since the early 1990s, it was just last year that Guinness certified the Panorama system as the "Largest Winekeeper" in the world. I happened to end up at the place during a quick trip to Philly and couldn't help marveling at 120-wine bottles all hooked up to individual taps. Single-pour systems may have caught on first in Europe, but it took Americans to scale them up into something that somehow reminds me of an organ.

As for the wine that came out of the machine, it tasted good to me, but I have a decidedly low-to-middle-brow palette in these things.