News

KING, General Electric help connoisseurs track their wine

A new home-use wine vault from General Electric and KING keeps wine cool, labeled and inventoried. The vault, part of GE's Monogram line, has obvious commercial crossover potential.

April 2, 2006

It's hard to keep track of wine, especially for those with $100,000 of it around the house. It needs to be stored, cooled and tracked so the owners, and presumably, the owners' friends, know when to drink it at its peak.

Enter GE's new self-service wine vault, a $35,000 cooler/kiosk combo made to keep the grapes good, and counted. KING Products & Solutions Inc.'s north American sales manager, Guy Markus, said he arranged the partnership with GE, which uses KING's LINK kiosk with label printer and barcode scanner to track the inventory.

"The focus and the function of the intelligent wine unit, it's the only one of its kind in the world right now, and the function of that is to manage your wine inventory," Markus said. "Some of these wine aficionados have anything from a $100,000 to a $1,000,000 wine collection. GE wanted to create a vault that was a touch screen inventory solution."

The walk-in cooler holds 1,000 or more bottles on moisture-resistant redwood racks inside the walk-in cooler. The racks are arranged for triple, double or single bottle storage, magnums and crates.

The climate control can adjust humidity, and maintain temperatures between 50 and 70 degrees. The unit is lined with R-33 foam insulation. The cooler also sports an internal tasting area, which can be adapted to the owner's tastes. According to GE, the unit can be installed in as little as a day.

"We decided to market this product for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was the fact that builders were approaching us with the need for an all-in-one wine room appliance," GE spokesperson Allison Eckelkamp said. "Additionally, we are seeing an overall trend in the popularity of wine and an increasing number of consumers with large wine collections who were demanding better ways to store, manage and protect their liquid assets. The major market for this appliance is the high-end consumer seeking to design a small wine room without having to do custom work."

Markus said the current software program tracks the bottles via individually printed barcodes. The database contains information on 20,000 different wines, and can tell the user when a bottle is out of stock, mature, or too old.

"Theoretically, you could order more bottles online right from your vault," Markus said "It's a living, breathing application."

The kiosk can also be connected to the Internet, making the inventory data accessible from anywhere on the Web. The software can present statistical information about the wine collection in chart form. Bottles can be assigned database keywords, and can be searched by a variety of criteria including year, grape, region, vintage, maturity and price.

"Right now it's being sold for residential purposes but it could certainly have potential for those who sell wine," Eckelkamp said.

Markus said GE is introducing the vault in inland markets first and perfecting the system before extending it to the more wine-savvy coast regions. According to GE, it will be available everywhere by summer. Eventually, it will include matching software, already popular as a kiosk application in some stores, with which users can match foods with appropriate wines.