Vijay Manwani desperately wants wine to be cool. Right now, he says, wine is many things: delicious, fascinating, great with fish. Snobby, definitely. Elitist, yep. But it's not cool. Manwani is kind of a wine snob himself. He's taken the classes, done the tastings, even lived in France among the grapes. He can hang with the swirling, earthy-tones-tasting best of them. But he hates that people like him are the only ones who really get to enjoy and appreciate wine.

Craft beer's done a fantastic job of being cool. Spirits have done a fantastic job of being cool... It's wine's turn to be cool. Vijay Manwani of Kuvée

"Craft beer's done a fantastic job of being cool," he says. "Spirits have done a fantastic job of being cool." You can talk about them, be interested in them, and not sound like a tool. "It's wine's turn to be cool."

Cool, in his eyes, looks more or less like a wine bottle with a Mophie case on it. Manwani's new product is called Kuvée. It's a big, wine-bottle-shaped object with Wi-Fi, a touchscreen, and a bunch of sensors. It's hollow, with a hole at the bottom. Into this hole, you slot metallic silver "refills" that each contain the same 750ml as a standard bottle of wine. When you want to have a drink, you pop in the silver refill canister and tip the wine into your glass just like a regular bottle. When you're done pouring, the refill canister seals back up to keep the oxygen out, which keeps the juice inside the canister from spoiling. Kuvée is designed to keep wine fresh for 30 days, several times longer than your average vino would last in your fridge or on your counter.

When you insert one of the canisters, the screen lights up with your new wine's label and backstory, along with some suggestions for food pairings. It tells you how much wine is left in the bottle, of course. You can also buy more refills right on the bottle—the e-store is curated by Kuvée, and the refills are shipped directly to you. "It's like Keurig for wine" isn't a perfect analogy, but Manwani makes it often, and it's close enough. Maybe a more apt comparison is the familiar box of wine, with its airtight bladder inside. It's different from both of these in at least one crucial way: Kuvée wine doesn't taste like dishwater.

Arbiter of Taste

As he pours a glass of 30-day-old red wine through the slightly slower-than-standard spout of the Kuvée bottle, Manwani explains why he got into the wine game. He's been in tech forever, mostly in the unsexy but lucrative infrastructure world. He's successful, he's rich, and for his next act he wanted to do something he was passionate about. And one day, after taking a wine course at Boston University (like I said, he's a wine snob), Manwani realized that most people, can't learn about wine the way he did. "The only thing you need [in order] to learn about wine," he says, "is the ability to have five, six bottles open at a time, and compare with friends." Given how quickly most wine goes bad, this is more or less impossible. So his first goal was to find a way to make a bottle of wine last a month.

It's like boxed wine, just fancier.

The key technology in Kuvée is the guillotine valve in the refill bottles, which is secure enough not to let extra oxygen in or out, and clean enough to not leave any trace on the larger bottle. Each bottle contains a bag, which is easy to seal from the elements. So it's like boxed wine, just fancier. "The real magic," though, Manwani says, "is the swapping." He loves the idea that you can hot-swap wine bottles, a bunch at a time, everyone in the room drinking whatever they want. "The ease with which you can access a glass of wine without guilt," he says, "we want that to be the best in the industry."

The wine business is enormous, to the tune of nearly $37 billion in sales in just the last year. Manwani is after a particular slice: people who spend about $15-50 on a bottle. "That's a perfect spot for them to focus on," says Rob McMillan, a wine industry analyst and EVP at the Silicon Valley Bank, because it's the fastest-growing part of the industry. Direct shipping's growing quickly too, he says, and more wineries are looking to be part of a curated club like Kuvée's. McMillan's not sure exactly how big Kuvee can get, or how it'll grapple with things like shipping costs and the long tail of small wineries all over the world. But "I think they have a really good shot," he says. "Plus, the thing looks cool."

Grape Expectations

Over the course of our conversation, Manwani talks a lot about Keurig, wide-eyed at the prospect of matching its ridiculous scale—9.2 million Keurig brewers and 10.5 billion pods sold last year—while presumably avoiding a Keurig Kold or Keurig DRM-level screwup. He also brings up Gillette's famous "razors and blades" analogy a lot. At first, the Kuvée will cost $199 (20 bucks less if you pre-order), but Manwani is already imagining a future where you get the bottle for free and just pay for the refills. His plan sounds more like a printer than anything, actually—get the printer free, spend an arm and a leg on the ink. Wine: it's the tastiest toner.

Thanks to sensors inside the bottle that track what, when, and how much you drink, Manwani imagines both Kuvée and wineries can mine data to figure out how and when to sell even more wine. (It's like Amazon's automatically-replenishing Dash service with a boozy edge.) He wants to work with wineries directly, who can bottle Kuvée refills with only tiny changes to their process. He's talking to wine clubs, and apps, and basically everyone who sells wine without requiring a guy with gelled hair and a skinny tie to open it for you.

The wine industry is centuries old, and has a reputation for being sort of fusty. That's changing quickly. "The technology has gone through the wine-making, the vineyards, through the consumer sales," McMillan says. "The last thing to really evolve is the consumer side of it." Manwani hopes to be that evolution, to change not just how wine is made but how we buy it, how we drink it, how we talk about it. And I have to say: the whole Kuvée setup looks a little clinical and strange, like it should be served to me on a hospital tray instead of in a wine glass. But that 30-day-old red tasted delicious. And it had just the right earthy notes. Those are a thing, right?