NB: This is a free audio taster – the full episode is available exclusively for Wine Blast PLUS subscribers. Use this link to subscribe to Wine Blast PLUS.

Summary

What makes a successful medical inventor develop a parallel life aiming to fundamentally change the way we drink wine?

How does frustration + a needle + some spare argon = a business that’s sold more than 2 million units and is involved in pouring a glass of wine every second of every day?!

Welcome to the world of Coravin – and its inventor, Greg Lambrecht.

This episode follows on from our previous show, where we touched on how Coravin is changing wine as we know it. 

But here we get to hear the full story from the horse’s mouth.

It’s in turn fascinating and funny.

A great human story of serendipity and determination. With plenty of useful tips, great anecdotes, and surprising detail.

Links

• Don’t forget that Wine Blast PLUS subscribers also get a 15% discount on the Coravin website. So you can recoup the cost of your subscription just by taking advantage of that…
• Coravin recently published The Coravin Guide, a free digital publication to flag up venues with the best by-the-glass offerings, initially focused on London, Sydney, Melbourne, Milan, the Netherlands and California (though with more locations to be added in due course).
• You can find our podcast on all major audio players: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Amazon and beyond. If you’re on a mobile, the button below will redirect you automatically to this episode on an audio platform on your device. (If you’re on a PC or desktop, it will just return you to this page – in which case, get your phone out! Or find one of the above platforms on your browser.)

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Transcript

This transcript is AI generated. It’s not perfect.

Peter: Hello! This is a short taster of an episode that’s now live for our Wine Blast PLUS subscribers: a full length interview with Greg Lambrecht, inventor of Coravin.

Susie: Greg leads an intriguing double life, one in spine surgery, the other where his unique inventions aim to do nothing less than change the way we drink wine forever.

Peter: Now, this follows on from our previous episode where we could only feature snippets of our chat. But the full interview is well worth your time. It’s in full, informative, full of practical tips and helpful insights. It’s entertaining and at times very funny. really, it’s just a great human story of how a brilliant medical mind is revolutionizing wine consumption.

Susie: And the story is still very much in the telling, given the new things Greg is currently working on. So what follows here is a taster of the full interview. If you want to listen to the whole thing, sign up to Wine Blast PLUS at wineblast.co.uk – and if it helps seal the deal, subscribe subscribers get 15% off Coravin gadgets too.

Peter: Now, I started the interview by asking Greg to introduce himself.

Greg Lambrecht: Yes, I’m, Greg Lambrecht. I’m the founder and inventor of Coravin and also the executive director of Intrinsic Therapeutics.

Peter: Glad we got both job titles in there. Fantastic.

Greg Lambrecht: I work in medicine, so you know, I care about them.

Peter: Good. So Greg, tell us a bit about your parallel life, your other life as a medic, where that began and what you sort of specialized in.

Greg Lambrecht: Yeah, I was, I was lucky in. I worked in physics, trained in physics as an undergrad and went, to Japan and worked in physics and, and came back realizing this is not the life that I wanted. and so went into graduate school and in mechanical engineering and sort of fell into biomechanical engineering, biomedical engineering. And I got hired by J and J, Johnson and Johnson to brainstorm and develop a new, a new product for them. It was, a. People were getting accidental transmissions of disease, hepatitis and AIDS by accidental needle sticks in the hospital. And they said, can you prevent this? And so I was one of the ones who developed one of the ways of shielding a needle after it’s been used. And I fell in love with it. It was three pieces of plastic and a piece of metal. And you know, it sold 100 million units. And I was like, okay, so this sounds like fun. I should do this. I got hired into Pfizer and, was hired to invent new products for them, which was a cool job. I mean, you know, Their bankroll and my desire to learn about medicine and invent. And so my boss, and I invented this process to, develop new medical devices. And so I’ve been inventing new therapies since I was in my 20s. And it all starts with an unmet need. A problem that you see that a patient is suffering, that the healthcare system fails to optimally deliver on a solution. And then you brainstorm solutions that need and invent a new product to solve it. And so I got to do that in orthopedics and cardiac surgery and cardiology and urology and obstetrics and gynecology and vascular surgery. And so now I’ve started a couple of different companies on my own after leaving that program. and I currently work in spine surgery. so I work in ruptured discs of the lower back, that cause sciatica, and a way to repair the disc so that it doesn’t happen again. So it’s a very fulfilling part of my life.

Peter: So just to be clear, you’ll carry on doing that very important medical work alongside the the Coravin stuff?

Greg Lambrecht: Yeah, I have a split personality. I’m half time in medicine, and we say, we joke. Spine and wine. My career rhymes. But, spine surgeons and surgeons in general love wine. So there’s a pretty significant crossover, between the two fields.

Peter: What are the strangest ways you’ve come across Coravin being used or abused?

Greg Lambrecht: I love my Californian brethren. I was in Los Angeles and, I was doing a trade event that wound up being a consumer event at the end at a wine store. And this, is right after launch. And this man came up to me. Says: I love Coravin. I love timeless. He said, let me show you what I do it. And he grabbed three different bottles of wine and a glass, and he blended his own wine in the, in the glass. And I was, he’s, he, he, he, he tasted, I tasted. I was like, that’s pretty good. And, and I said, do NOT tell the producers of these wines you have done this. And there are no photographs of me in this doing this. you know, so, you know, Rudy Kurniawan was a very good blender, right? So it’s not necessarily, it doesn’t have to be done nefariously. So I, I thought that, the other ways, the, the unique ways that surprised me. Chateau Margaux, very, innovative user, of Coravin. from the beginning,

00:05:00

Greg Lambrecht: they, they use it to re-bottle their wines, re cork their wines. so in Bordeaux, if you’ve existed for a long time. You know, you have this massive cellar and you’re worried about the quality of the cork. So, you know, they take a pile of wines in the 1950s, the same wine, and what they used to do is pull the cork on all of them, taste through all of them to see if any of them have gone bad, find the one that tastes the best, and then use that to top up all the rest of the bottles and then re cork everything. And the whole process took 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, depending upon the number of bottles they were opening. And it would be. All the bottles would be exposed to air during this period of time. And some of these wines are quite delicate from the 50s or 40s and very valuable. And so what they switched to doing with Coravin immediately was Coravining all the bottles, finding the bottles that were bad, finding the one they should top up with. And then they would just pull the cork, top up close, pull the cork, top up close, and go across and they’re like, wine’s barely open and it’s got a layer of argon on the inside. And so, that was a very cool, unexpected use. and then there’s all the beautiful things, like, still my favorite dessert. I was in a restaurant that no longer exists in New York. The Pandemic shut it down. Lydia Bastianich’s restaurant and the sommelier. There was a dessert, there was a cheese plate, and it was a hundred US dollars. What cheese is possibly making this one hundred us dollars? The waiter said, wait one moment. And the sommelier came by and he goes, it’s US$100 because you get three glasses of Chateau Yquem and it’s 1986, 1996 and 2006 Chateau, Yquem by the glass. And I was like, how are you doing that? He’s like, oh, there’s this wonderful thing called Coravin F. And, that was, you know, nobody opens and drinks a bottle of Chateau Yquem. Rarely opens and drinks a bottle of Chateau Yquem. But to get three different decades and cheese was spectacular, you know, it was awesome.

Peter: Greg, you’re very kindly giving away a timeless six plus Hermitage as part of our, ah, Wine Blast One million giveaway. if you could have one bottle to use this on right now, price no issue, what would it be?

Greg Lambrecht: Oh, best wine that I’ve ever had. 1899 Corton Rouge from a producer who no longer exists. These were pre-phylloxera, pre grafting Burgundy and, red. So found under the corner of a chapel in the Czech Republic under the Castle Bechof, along with a few hundred other wines buried by a Nazi sympathizing Belgian who was running from the Russians in World War II. Right. It’s. It’s got a history. And I was asked to Coravin through 12 of the bottles so that they could auction them and sell them off, to repair the church roof. And I was there with master ah of wine, Andreas Wickoff and a great sommelier from the Czech Republic. And we Coravin through all these different wines. And it was chateau Yquem from 1892, 96 and 99. And it was extraordinary. But then we had this pre-phylloxera Corton Rouge that nobody thought was worth anything. We poured a glass, to. For the three of us to tast. And people could smell it meters away. It was. My skin still tingles. it’s. It’s the best thing I’ve tasted, of anything, food or liquid. and it was just so alive. And there was a sommelier in the crowd who asked us to pour another glass. We could pass it around to everybody. And, he said, he said, you know, this winemaker doesn’t exist. This producer is gone. The person who made it is long dead. Probably their grandchildren are gone, and these grapevines are gone, and yet this wine is still alive. and I thought, we are such a strange species to have these things that outlive us, that we pass on to future generations to be able to taste, to experience that vintage, that 1899. And, somebody’s incredible work. You know, there’s so few things that are like that outside of the art world and architecture, you know, but from a consumable, right. From a beverage, a Buddhist piece of art, right where you, or mandala, like piece of art. It’s gone when it’s consumed. it’s just a fantastic, fantastic relationship between us and the great

Peter: Greg Lambrecht: quick fire questions! Question number one. Running or walking?

Greg Lambrecht: Running.

Peter: By the glass or by the bottle?

Greg Lambrecht: By the glass.

Peter: Medicine or wine?

Greg Lambrecht: Medicine.

Peter: Good. I feel more reassured that you said that. But, you know, tough one.

Greg Lambrecht: Especially if you’re getting one of my implants. You probably hope that I care more about one than the other.

Peter: Pinot Noir, or Syrah?

Greg Lambrecht: Syrah.

Peter: Old world or new world?

00:10:00

Greg Lambrecht: Old world.

Peter: Old wine or young wine?

Greg Lambrecht: Old wine.

Peter: Most memorable wine moment.

Greg Lambrecht: Blind tasting five years with the Burgundy producers being scared out of my pants.

Peter: And what happened?

Greg Lambrecht: Monsieur Lafarge, when he was still alive, 83 or 4. He looked at me while I was pacing and everybody was quiet. Blind tasting. And he just holds both of his thumbs up and smiles. Oh, thank God.

Peter: most embarrassing wine moment.

Greg Lambrecht: Brought the wrong control bottle to a blind tasting with Jancis Robinson. I thought my company was sunk upon launch. And she looked at me and she goes, I can tell the difference between these wines. And she goes, and by the way, you brought the wrong control bottle. And I was like, I have failed and I’m an idiot.

Peter: Clearly, no impediment to your success. what one wine thing do you most want to achieve professionally?

Greg Lambrecht: Anything available by the glass at retail, at home and at the restaurant.

Peter: What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Greg Lambrecht: The chance to try to improve somebody’s life, whether it’s through medicine or a great glass of wine.

Peter: What a wonderful thing to be able to say. Greg, thank you very much indeed.

Greg Lambrecht: Oh, thank you, Peter. I really appreciate the time and the interest.

Peter: So, there we go. If you want to hear this fantastic interview in full, all you have to do is subscribe to Wine Blast PLUS. you will not only be supporting the show, you’ll also get fine subscriber only bonus content like this, or our, exclusive report on a blind tasting of top 2021 Super Tuscans, for example. and of course, you get early access to all episodes, plus full archive access not to mention subscriber benefits and givewaways!

Susie: Such as 15% off Coravin goodies! Just head to wineblast.co.uk or click the link in our show notes. Thank you and cheers!

00:12:01