Close to a decade ago, households with wine collections and cellars to house them had only a few choices: spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wine management system and hire someone to catalog every bottle in your collection or lose track of most bottles in your collection. And for wine enthusiasts, losing track of what you own is like throwing money out of the window because each wine has its own “drinking window” and once it’s passed, the wine loses value and drinkable potential.
Today, access to information about wine – whether it’s the wine you’re drinking at a restaurant or wine you personally own – has never been easier to find. But the issue of collection storage and management remains – this is where Sommely comes in. Created by Uncorked Studios, a design & engineering firm and backed by Intel, Sommely is smart inventory management system that comes with “smartcaps” to fit over each bottle of wine and a companion app and database. As you acquire new bottles of wine, you catalog them in your system and pair them via Bluetooth with a smartcap, then placing the cap on your bottle. You can record information like its, year, vineyard, where you purchased it, anything memorable behind the bottle, when to drink it and with what types of food you might considering pairing with it.
The smartcap acts as a sort of guide or flag, especially if you have a large wine collection stored cap-side out in wine racks. The app lets you find wines you own based on whatever criteria you’d like and then activates the smartcap to light up once you’ve selected it, for easy access. You can also tap the smartcap and your app will display that wine’s info, negating the need to pull the bottle completely out.
While not all of us have wine cellars at home or large wine collections to manage, the idea that Intel is putting resources into smart beverage management systems is intriguing. For the full story, visit Beverage Daily.