Is the wine bottle broken?
For at least 6,000 years, humans have been using perfectly serviceable clay amphoras and glass bottles to hold one of our civilization’s greatest achievements. But now a Boston startup, Kuvée, suggests that it’s time to modernize the way we store and serve wine. This summer, it started shipping a $200 Internet-connected wine bottle — complete with a full-color touchscreen on the front — to customers in Massachusetts and California.
Only about 200 of the bottles are in circulation, and chief executive Vijay Manwani says that he expects that number to reach about 500 by the end of the year. When Manwani, a successful tech entrepreneur, talks about the billion-dollar opportunity to change how wine is consumed, he compares it to the way another Massachusetts company, Keurig, changed millions of people’s morning java ritual with its single-serve coffee brewer.
Earlier this week, I convened two product designers and two experts at Belly Wine Bar in Cambridge to test out the Kuvée. Some of them arrived with their corkscrews already drawn: even before he crossed the threshold, Gianfranco Zaccai, president of the Boston design firm Continuum, wondered how a bottle with a digital display could ever match the ritual and romance of pulling the cork and sharing a spicy syrah.
To combat that bias, we arranged for a blind tasting of three different California wines: a sauvignon blanc from Coppola, a chardonnay from Girard, and a cabernet sauvignon from Round Pond Estate. A Kuvée employee, Nils Teissier du Cros, served the wine, and we asked our tasters to leave the room as each new wine was decanted. Tasters were confronted with four glasses and a tasting sheet. Two of the glasses contained wine from the Kuvée system, and two from glass bottles. (Yes, there was also a spit bucket for excess wine. No, I didn’t imbibe as I was taking notes.)
But before the first round was poured, the participants started peppering Teissier du Cros with questions about the Kuvée bottle; I recruited only tasters who hadn’t seen one before.
“What happens if it falls in the sink or gets wet?” asked Liz Vilardi, wine director and owner of Belly. Teissier du Cros says it can handle a few splashes of water but can’t be submerged. “Accidents do happen,” Vilardi said.
Ali Yakich, a sommelier who works at the Four Seasons Boston, wondered about the sorts of wines that Kuvée plans to offer. “Our focus is really on the $15 to $35 bottle of wine,” Teissier du Cros replied. Kuvée currently offers 64 wines from 16 different wineries, primarily in the United States.
The bottle itself has a number of features that Kuvée thinks will make it appealing not necessarily to connoisseurs, but to mainstream wine drinkers who might have a glass or two with dinner. Manwani has dubbed it the “fat middle.” It’s not people who will drink anything and don’t care if it has been in a box in the fridge for weeks. And it’s not someone who has attained Level IV in the Court of Master Sommeliers. It’s the approximately 29 million Americans between those two poles, Manwani says.
The Kuvée bottle is an intelligent sleeve for an aluminum canister that actually contains the wine — 750 milliliters, same as a typical glass wine bottle. (It is sold with a starter set of four wine canisters.) A valve at the bottle’s neck dispenses the wine when you tilt the bottle down toward the rim of a glass, without letting any oxygen in. You can easily swap out a canister of red for a canister of white, having multiple bottles going at once.
The company says one big advantage is that the system can keep wine tasting fresh for as long as 30 days. Another is that you can learn about the wine from the digital label and reorder the vintages you like best. A not-yet-released feature will let you rate the wine you’re drinking and have Kuvée automatically recommend others you might like.
We compared four different “modalities” of each wine. Two were dispensed from the Kuvée system; one had been open for two days, and another for nine days. The other two modalities came from traditionally glass bottles, one “fresh” from the bottle, and one aged nine days. Both the glass bottles were plugged with a Vacu Vin stopper, a device that extracts air from the bottle and runs between $10 and $15.
When the tasters got to work, the wine room at Belly got very quiet. They swirled, sipped, and sniffed, making notes on a tasting sheet. We asked them to focus on two criteria only: complexity and drinkability. When Teissier du Cros poured the next round, everyone else adjourned to the main room of the bar and discussed the Kuvée product.
Yakich saw it as “cooler than a wine club where you get wines delivered to you and you get paper notes about each wine.” She saw it appealing to relatively new wine drinkers in their 20s.
Zaccai was still not convinced that the bottle would be used by any serious wine drinkers — he felt it was “intrusive” just sitting on the table — but he said that Kuvée “may be defining a new category — a wine nerd — someone who [is] interested in technology in any stripe. I suspect it’ll be interesting to a number of people.” He also questioned the pricing of Kuvée’s introductory package: “If it’s $200 for the bottle and four containers of wine, and the typical wine drinker spends $12 on a bottle, that is an expensive thing to buy for the cool factor.”
Vilardi, who also owns a Cambridge wine shop called Central Bottle + Provisions, seemed to regard the product as a guest she didn’t want to invite to her dinner party. “Why would you put this giant thing on the table?” she asked. “You don’t let your family bring their phones to the table.” But she also admitted that she was viewing it as a retailer who might be cut out of the loop by a company like Kuvée shipping wines directly to its customers. And she contended that “a Vacu Vin does exactly what this does for about $10.”
Andrew Edman, founder of Boston-based Clear Design Lab, was the most open-minded. “I can see people using it more privately, maybe, than socially — like a techie bachelor using it as a personal trainer for wine, to educate himself more.” He also felt it could appeal to people outside of the city and suburbs, “in places without good wine retailers.” He described himself as the least-experienced taster of the bunch — someone who drinks between one and four glasses a week.
When it came to tasting, the Kuvée wines fared pretty well. Vilardi said she wasn’t thrilled to serve any of the four glasses of sauvignon blanc in front of her, but if pressed, the one she’d pick was from the Kuvée system (open for two days). Edman and Zaccai also leaned toward that wine, though Zaccai marked the Kuvée open for nine days as “not acceptable.”
The two-day-open Kuvée-dispensed chardonnay came out on top for Yakich, and it was among Edman’s two picks in that category. (Vilardi preferred the chardonnay that had just been poured from a traditional bottle.)
With the cabernet, Yakich said there were only slight differences between the four but picked the wine that had been in the Kuvée system for nine days. That modality, and the wine stored for two days with a Vacu Vin, were Edman’s choice.
Kuvée is a small company — just 16 employees — and it has collected just over $10 million from backers to develop the product and get it into the hands of a few hundred customers. Manwani says it will need to raise even more capital in 2017 as it tries to introduce the product to thousands or millions of wine drinkers.
“It’s an ambitious project,” he says. But if Kuvée succeeds, the Friday evening trip to the wine shop might soon be supplanted by the Friday evening recharging of the Internet-connected wine bottle.
Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner.