Did you ever wish that drinking adult grape juice could involve more pretentiousness and gadgetry? Kuveé (VC: $6mm) sure as shit did. Their smart wine bottle brings the exciting technological world of vendor lock-in, cloud services that will soon be shut down and miniscule battery life to the staid world of smushed grapes in bottles. You can tell that they mean business, because they figured out how to put an accent mark on one of their e’s.
One suspects that the wine bottle connects to The Cloud simply because someone had a bunch of leftover AWS credits and this was the best idea anyone could come up with to burn them off.
Will investors make their money back? Seems real unlikely, but people do seem to drink a lot of this stuff already. They need to sell like 2 million bottles of wine to recoup the investment to date, and it’s not like anything could possibly go wrong before that happens.
Should you enjoy the free ride? The wine isn’t particularly any cheaper than down the street, but it does come in fancy bottles with screw tops and you can buy it in the middle of the night (not unlike buying a ticket to board the Night Train). No word yet on whether Kuveé’s Smart Bottle works with third-party paper bag accessories.
Instead of investing in a Wine Consumption System, you could just drink your wine faster. Or buy smaller bottles. If you are really determined to be a nerd about it, just inject some argon in there.
Who is this disrupting??? Kuveé is working with partner vineyards, so it isn’t the entire wine industry. Not really the wine bottle industry either. Hmm. Is it those fat cats in the wine cork industry?
Investor Dumbness Quotient (IDQ) Certified IDQ rating B. A robo wine bottle is dumb. Kuveé’s Smart Bottle design doesn’t even do much for freshness beyond hopeful optimism. Kuveé is also adding another layer of middlemanery to an industry literally bursting at the seams with mid-men. Who knows though, maybe they’ll only lose half of their money.
Obligatory puff piece (OPP) Wired seems real excited about getting some fancy screw-top wine for the office.