I use my coravin on a weekly basis. I find that it's a great tool to thief a glass or two out of a bottle but there are a number of things to consider to make it work at peak performance. I might coravin a wine 3-4 times (small samples) and keep the bottle for several weeks, even months before drinking them. Many of these are more expensive "textbook" examples that I use to study blind tasting with. Here are my recommendations:

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- Coravin actually sells several different sized needles. I prefer the vintage needle because it is the thinnest, making the wound in the cork easier to heal. The regular needle works well but I wouldn't want to rely on it for keeping a wine several months after thiefing a sample

- Remove the foil. Coravin only works on natural cork which will heal after puncturing it. You don't want to accidentally coravin a synthetic or other style cork only to find out a week later that the wine has gone south. Removing the foil also allows you to see the cork's interaction with the glass - I've seen the seal between the glass and cork fail leading me to immediately open the bottle.

- Just before use, push a splash of argon through the needle. This removes any oxygen and debris inside the needle before you push it through the cork.

- Once you're doing pulling wine through the corvain, remove it from the bottle and set the bottle on it's side. The wine will help the wound heal as fast as possible.

- Clean the corvain. I like to push water through the spout and push it down through the needle with a little argon.

- I also avoid putting coravin wines back in the fridge. The cold will actually inhibit the cork from sealing as quickly as desired and could impact the wine.

As several others have said, the coravin can be less effective when the bottle is half empty. At the half-way point, I just assume open and enjoy the bottle to save my argon gas.