WHAT I’VE LEARNED | Greg Lambrecht
Greg Lambrecht is the inventor of Coravin, the wine access device that allows wine to be poured without pulling the cork, while preserving the rest of the bottle for future use. It has allowed 67 Pall Mall to offer up to 1,000 wines by the glass. He tells us how he did it…
‘The very first medical device I developed was an implantable chemotherapy infusion system. I studied Nuclear Engineering at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and then did a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. Then I worked at Pfizer for seven years, developing hip and knee prosthetics, trauma devices, implantable ports for renal therapies, cardiac catheters and access devices, and surgical tools for obstetrics and gynaecology.’
‘I started my own company in 1999, inventing new medical therapies for unmet clinical needs. It was right around the time I started developing Coravin. I had got really good at making needles that didn’t do damage to things when they went through. I remember being in the kitchen, holding a bottle of wine, and really wanting just a glass. My then-wife was pregnant and I was thinking “there’s got to be a way I can use a needle to get wine out of that bottle without removing the cork.”
‘I had the first functional prototype ready in 2001, but it was just for me. I worked on fine-tuning it at the weekends, but I was running two companies by then [one developing cardiac valve therapies, the other developing spinal implants], so life was busy.’
‘Then I showed it to friends, and they wanted one too. So I began making versions for them, and they said it totally changed the way they drank wine. It was a slow realisation that I was not alone in my desire to drink wine by-the-glass at home, and try different things.’
‘I kept refining the device over 11 years, to prove to myself that it worked. Finally, one friend in particular pushed me to start a business. That was almost 13 years from when I first started working on it. Looking back, that time was actually really critical in convincing myself that it worked.’
‘By that time I believed that the consumer at home would have an interest. But I didn’t understand how a restaurant wine programme worked, or the economics of the industry, or how much they cared about this. Even in my wildest dreams, I never thought that it would be as successful as it has been.’
‘There’s a restaurateur in Crete who has a drawing of my face at the entrance to his restaurant, because he’s so thankful for Coravin. I’ve never been there, but I’d love to.’
‘If I was to start again, there are three things I would do differently. Firstly the marketing strategy. We struggled to find a clever way of describing it. A wine preservation system? Not really. A wine access system – what does that mean? I took to describing it as a magic trick – “we pour wine from a bottle without opening it”. And that became a tagline but also a constraint. It took us way too long to say ‘Coravin is the perfect wine-by-the-glass system.’
‘Then, at the London launch, [wine writer] Victoria Moore asked me, ‘Does it work on sparkling wine?’ I’d done a decade of research, and I’d never even thought of that. Sparkling wine seemed so far from the by-the-glass concept – it oxidises and goes flat. It took us another eight years to produce a device for sparkling wine; I wish I’d started earlier.
‘Then there were the instructions. The original ones might as well have been in hieroglyphics. To comprehend them was a miracle, so there was a lot of mis-use. Primarily, not washing it, which is critical – you can get brettanomyces and other bacteria growing on the inside. And clearing. Giving the trigger a quick press before moving from one bottle to the next clears the needle and mouth of wine from the last bottle. We didn’t do a great job of communicating that in the early days.’
‘I brought a case of wine to London that I had Coravinned 19 years earlier, and then multiple times along the way, to try and prove that the wines would all taste the same. Sadly, it was a $15 wine that was not built for two decades of ageing: Thorn Clarke’s Shotfire Barossa Shiraz. Jancis Robinson MW said: ‘OK Greg, it works – they’re all equally bad’.
‘For most people, that fear of exploration comes from not being able to try before you buy. We say “Here’s this bottle of wine; trust me, it’s great. It’s not quite great now, but it will be in five years.” You wouldn’t tell someone to keep a pair of shoes in the box and not wear them for five years.’
‘When I started the medical companies, I was the CEO, running both of them. But I’m no Elon Musk. So when I founded Coravin, I realised I couldn’t have so many direct reports – that absorbs all your time, it’s unhealthy, you’ll fall apart. So I stepped back to chairman, and hired CEOs. Chairman is a loosely defined role, so I can be flexible, but I still work seven days a week across my spinal implant company and Coravin.’
‘I love the invention process of finding a solution to large unmet needs, and the commercial challenge of changing people’s behaviour for the better. There’s always a fear of change – and the same is true of wine. Convincing people they can have three different wines in a night – sparkling, white and red – and come back to them whenever they want.’
‘When I met Anne-Claude Leflaive, she gave me a hug and said ‘thank you’. Among producers, Burgundy has been the most receptive wine region in world to Coravin. It has a reputation for being conservative, but production there is so limited, and the wines so expensive that you don’t want to pull a cork for every person that comes by.’
‘The health lobby and people’s concern about health, moving people to ordering a glass in a restaurant rather than a bottle, has probably been beneficial to us. I work in medicine, so I have to watch my consumption. But let’s put the risk in context. The most convincing studies I’ve seen say that a man who drinks one-to-two glasses of wine a day will, on average, lose two-and-a-half months of his life. For me, that’s an acceptable price to pay.’
‘I started as a typical US male wine lover, drinking a lot of California wine. Then I evolved to love northern Rhône wines – Côte Rôtie, Cornas, St Joseph – particularly how they evolve over time. Magical. Now I’m at Riesling, Burgundy and Champagne, plus a bit of Barolo. It’s amazing how your tastes change.’
Greg Lambrecht will be hosting a tasting at the London Club on Tuesday 3rd September, Putting Coravin to the Test
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TWO
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