Meet the medical engineer that revolutionised the way wines are served and sold with a chemotherapy needle

Necessity is the mother of invention. Frustrated at the need to finish a bottle of wine once it was opened, Greg Lambrecht started to dream of ways he could enjoy several glasses and keep the rest for another time a few weeks or months down the road.

“When my wife became pregnant and stopped drinking, I had a crisis on my hands,” chuckled the wine lover, whose passion was ignited in college by a sip of Peju Winery’s first vintage, a 1985 Cabernet Sauvignon, in Napa Valley.

After graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in nuclear engineering, Lambrecht spent most of his career in medical technologies. One of his patented inventions was a chemotherapy delivery system where a micro-needle was used to access an implant underneath a patient’s skin.

He said: “I remember sitting in my kitchen with a bottle of wine and a needle from my chemotherapy system, thinking there has got to be a way I can use this to get the wine out of the bottle and not worry about the remaining wine going bad.”

That was in 1999. After more than a decade of experimenting and making prototypes for friends to test them out, Lambrecht officially launched the Coravin wine preservation system in 2013. The name is a portmanteau of the Latin word for “heart” (“cora”) and the French word for wine (“vin”).  He explained: “At the heart of wine consumption is sharing with friends and exploring different vintages. I wanted Coravin to be a tool to explore that variety at your own pace and not be dictated by a bottle.”

Coravin’s devices involve inserting a needle through the cork of a bottle without displacing any of the cork material. As wine is extracted through the needle, it is replaced with pure argon gas. The remaining wine is left untouched by oxygen, ensuring its freshness until the next pour as if it was newly opened. For screwcap bottles, there are self-sealing silicone screwcaps that can withstand up to 50 punctures of the Coravin needle and preserve the wine for up to three months. The latest model is the Coravin Vinitas, which caters to businesses such as wine clubs, trade dealers and educators for whom samplings are key. The table-top device can break down a 750ml bottle into seven sample-size bottles without exposure to air, preserving the wines’ freshness for up to a year. 

Coravin’s technology and concept was so avant-garde that reaction from the fiercely traditional wine industry was mixed. Lambrecht, who is now based in Boston, USA, said: “The Australians are open-minded, receptive and extremely creative. They adopted Coravin everywhere, from the wineries and restaurants to the distributors and consumers at home. The French and Swiss markets are more driven by home usage, while the English use Coravin extensively in the restaurants and bars as they drink out a lot.”

In Singapore, there are two main challenges: Explaining how the Coravin system worked and why people would want to use it. Lambrecht said: “People would ask, ‘I will finish the bottle, why do I need this?’”

It was the pandemic that threw the company into the limelight. Lambrecht explained: “From a few million dollars in trade sales in February 2020, the figures plummeted to US$435 (S$593) two months later. We were in panic. Restaurants were shutting down worldwide. Later on, many consumers starting buying Coravin products because they wanted to have that restaurant experience at home and the sales figures shifted towards home use.”

Wine bar Praelum was one of the earliest adopters, purchasing the system in 2013 directly from the US even before it came into the country. Its director Gerald Lu shared: “The Coravin system has become the biggest gamechanger in terms of managing inventory, wastage and loss. In the past, we could only preserve wine for a few days and if we were lucky, up to a week. But Coravin has extended that by months, even years.”  

Fool Wine Bar’s head sommelier Davis Tan Jia Jie agreed: “For an explorative place like ours, it instils confidence in our guests and encourages them to try something out of their comfort zone. The preservation of wines Coravin offers compared to other technologies on the market remains unmatched; it’s compact, reliable and easy to operate.”

Master of Wine Richard Hemming, who is 67 Pall Mall’s head of wine for Asia, called Coravin “the gold standard of wine preservation” used by the private members’ wine club since its first London flagship opened in 2015. He said:  “Coravin allows us to offer 1,000 wines by the glass. Not only does it provide reliable presentation, but its handheld design makes it easy to use and doesn’t require specialist installation or training.”

Despite the raves, all three wine experts feel that the system would be less efficient in a high-speed, high-volume venue where wines move at a quicker rate and the staff is not trained to manage the number of bottles to open. The Vinitas model is also unable to process sparkling wines at the moment, a feature that Lambrecht says he is already working on.

He believes that Coravin will help to arrest the diminishing interest in wine drinking among the younger generation.  He shared: “There’s panic in most wine regions about how little Gen Zs are drinking. Gen Z is purchasing much less than the millennials and the baby boomers due to a shift to healthier living. They are also very eclectic and exploratory in their wine consumption behaviour, drinking wines from Greece, Spain, Portugal, Georgia and Armenia. Coravin enables us to fractionalise the service of wine so people can try all sorts of different things.”

His main purpose is simple. He said: “Disruptive innovation is about adding to an existing industry in a way that never existed before, and by doing so, it advances everybody's life and humanity as a whole. I don’t want Coravin to disrupt the drinking of a bottle when people want to do so. But if you want a glass or to try different bottles with friends or your spouse, you can now do so without arguing. I want to expand the ways that wine is enjoyed, served and sold.”