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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

smart wine

Plum Raises $9 Million To Create An AI-Powered Keg For Wine

One of the worst things about opening a bottle of wine and not finishing it – aside from the lack of drunkenness – is the shortened shelf-life that bottle now has. Once air hits the wine, oxidation kicks in and at first may allow the beverage to open up but will eventually cause the wine to go bad.

That is the main problem driving wine startup Plum, a company that’s created and patented a smart wine serving appliance (aka a fancy keg for wine) that preserves a bottle of wine for 90 days, allowing single serving pours for up to three months. Plum has just raised a Series A round of $9 million and plans to ship pre-ordered systems this fall. Similar attempts have been made to create devices to make serving beer more enjoyable and close to an “on-tap” experience but Plum claims to have the first appliance that “automatically preserves, chills and serves wine by the glass” in the home market.

Plum has several unique features and requires very little of the consumer to get started. Place a 750 mL bottle of wine into the appliance’s chamber and close the door. The machine’s specialized (and patent-pending) needle will pierce whatever material surrounds the bottle’s opening and extract wine while also injecting argon gas to prevent oxidation.

The appliance is pretty high-tech too: with built-in cameras along with a cloud database of over 6 million wines, Plum will read the wine label and identify on the touchscreen what bottle is inside. The company claims the device is able to accurately identify wine’s 95% of the time. Plum is a good example of the growth in the use of cameras inside cooking and storage appliances paired with cloud intelligence to enhance the consumer experience with food and beverages.

The machine also chills the wine based on the varietal but can be manually adjusted by the user. And the life of the argon gas chamber is up to 200 bottles (refills are $29) so Plum’s initial longevity can be pretty long, depending on your individual drinking habits. The price of Plum’s smart wine appliance isn’t cheap – one system will set you back $1499 and the company is still taking preorders with plans to ship in “fall 2017.”

The $9 million investment, led by Khosla Ventures (Hampton Creek, InstaCart, Consumer Physics) and Las Olas Venture Capital along with other angel investors from the tech, wine and hospitality markets. The company says the investment will be used to take the smart appliance to the hospitality industry, allowing hotels to put Plum in guest rooms to deliver a better “mini-bar” experience and adding another in-room revenue source. Plum has already inked deals with big hotel chains including Four Seasons, Hilton, Marriott and the Hyatt among others.

Wine and AI: A Perfect Pairing of Technology and Tradition

If you have trouble figuring out what is the best wine to pair with tonight’s dinner, we have some good news: artificial intelligence may soon be able to help you with that age old question, ‘Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc?’ That’s because a new wave of AI-powered virtual sommeliers are now available to help make those decisions.

Old Problem, New Solution

For decades the wine industry has struggled to overcome the anxiety associated with selecting a wine. Now thanks to technology you no longer have to have an awkward conversation with the clerk at the wine store, but can turn to a virtual sommelier to pick the perfect bottle.

There have been many virtual wine selectors available for some time.  However, we are now seeing increasing intelligence integrated into these solutions, making them both more powerful and more personal.

Wine Ring, headquartered in Syracuse, New York and founded in 2010, offers one of the most personal wine selection experiences available.  Unlike other apps that offer wine suggestions based on pairing suggestions or expert ratings, Wine Ring bases suggestions on your individual preferences.  This app uses advanced algorithms to develop a personal profile based on your rating of wines and then recommends bottles based on your taste profile. The more wine you drink and rate, the better the AI and the better the wine recommendations.

Google is also serving up wine suggestions.  Google’s new “My Wine Guide” is a conversation action added to Google Assistant for wine pairing suggestions.  While My Wine Guide is currently limited in its depth of AI and personalization of wine suggestions, what makes Google’s virtual sommelier most promising is how it integrates easy conversation format with computer based wine queries. Looking forward, “My Wine Guide” could become even more useful is to take the food pairing suggestion and then offer a variety of wines matching that paring at different price points which the user could verbally order and have delivered via a service like Drizzly, all from conversation based commands.

Once you get your recommendation from Wine Ring or “My Wine Guide” you can take it to Wine Searcher, a tool for locating and pricing wine (and beer and spirits) across all online stores.  Wine Searcher uses artificial intelligence to classify wines, linking the hundreds of thousands of products and tens of thousands of retailers to produce wine suggestions and pricing based on inputted search terms.

Wine Searcher is also integrating label recognition technology and developing a chatbot to improve user interaction with the site.

Vivino is already using label recognition technology to help guide wine purchases.  With Vivino the user simply takes a photo of the wine label they are considering and is instantly provided the wine’s rating, average price and review from the community of 22 million users.  The app then tracks which wines you scan and rate, but does not at this point offer suggestions based on your profile.

All of these tools aim to take the age-old mystery out of picking wine by applying artificial intelligence. While the wine industry is steeped in tradition and ancient ways, it could be the very modern application of artificial intelligence that makes wine and wine selection relevant to today’s consumers.

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Image credit: Flickr user a.has

Intel’s Efforts To Connect Collectors To Their Wine

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.