Can ‘Keurig Of Wine’ Save Vintages, Sales From Going Stale?

Ten years from now, pundits will remark on how lucky those drinkers were to live through such a renaissance period for craft beers and locally distilled liquor. Until now, however, wine has been conspicuously left out of that wave of innovation.

If Kuvee Founder Vijay Manwani has anything to say about it, wine is about to become the most high-tech of all the spirits.

Bloomberg has the story of Kuvee, the smart wine bottle that seeks to revolutionize an industry that’s struggled to make adequate use of the digital age’s tools. With Kuvee, winos ditch the cork and the twist-off caps for a series of insertable canisters that are placed into a reusable outer shell. This shell taps each canister, which can be removed and swapped out for other varieties, without allowing oxygen to enter and degrade the quality of the wine, and a touchscreen on the front shows users information on the current blend they’re drinking, how they can order more and what other types of wine they’ve opened but not yet finished with the Kuvee device.

For Manwani, the Kuvee system brings an element of convenience to wine drinking that other alcohol aficionados have enjoyed for years.

“You can drink a great craft beer on Tuesday night; you can drink a great cocktail on Tuesday night; you can’t drink a great bottle of wine on Tuesday night,” Manwani told Bloomberg.

Each canister used with Kuvee will ostensibly stay fresh for about 30 days, and Manwani believes that this could give consumers a level of choice and freedom to explore their wine interest that normal bottles and their quickly deteriorating contents can’t – instead of struggling to finish a bottle before it goes bad in a few days, Manwani said that he thinks a system like Kuvee can give consumers more time to taste how their grapes actually should taste like, and their better experiences will naturally – but not at all drunkenly – lead to higher sales.