London - An American company has developed one of the strangest “Internet of Things” devices ever created – a wifi-enabled, touchscreen-equipped wine bottle.
The Kuvée bottle has been crowd funded by IndieGoGo, and looks set to become a reality. The bottle costs £125 (R2 700), and users need to buy special wine cartridges to stick at the bottom when they want a drink.
The Kuvée’s marketing is strange – the promotional video sings the praises of the screen, which can give you information like the variety of wine you’re drinking, its strength, good food pairings and some information about the vineyard. In other words, it does the same thing as a paper label.
Amazingly, since the Kuvée is made of opaque aluminium, users can also check the screen for an estimate of how much is left in the bottle – a solution to a problem which no-one who drinks from a glass wine bottle has ever had.
Hook the bottle up to your wifi and you can order new wine through the screen, although if you already own a smartphone or laptop, it can do the same thing. And since it runs on a battery, you’ll have to recharge it every few hours.
The real product at the heart of Kuvée is the aluminium bottles which slot in the bottom – they don’t let any light in, reducing the risk of the wine spoiling over time, and a simple valve covered by a screw-top cap apparently prevents too much air reaching the drink.
The idea is that users could have a few bottles open at a time, without worrying about them going off. It’s a good idea, but it seems like the internal metal bottles could do the job on their own, without their £125 (about R2 600) digital casing.
Once you've got a Kuvée, you're locked into the system. You can only use it with Kuvée-compatible bottles, limiting what you can drink.The first 1 000 bottles will ship to customers in October.
We will have to struggle on with our dumb glass bottles for the time being.
The Independent