South Australian brothers, Joshua and Simon Schmidt of Vinnovate have won the Brancott Estate winexplorer innovation challenge and $35,000, following a competitive pitch to a panel of expert judges from the world of wine, entrepreneurship, innovation and media.

Their winning innovation is the Vino Cap – a screw cap that has been designed to enhance your wine by either dropping in flavours and aromas or by reducing the impact of things like sulphites. The screams from the world’s wine purists will be deafening on this one… “YOU CAN’T ‘ENHANCE’ A WINE, WINE IS A REPRESENTATION OF ITS TERROIR!!!”

Well, the truth is, 90 odd percent of wine drinkers, a figure pulled out from you know where, don’t really give a toss about the terroir of the wine and a lot of what they drink could probably do with a bit of enhancing anyway. So although I personally care, in that I’d never want to change anything about a good wine, I can see how this invention would work. For example, you’ve got a Thai dish with a lot of intense spicy flavours but, like most wine drinkers, you’re not that skilled at wine pairing and probably wouldn’t have thought to get hold of a Riesling, Gewürztraminer or Carménère, for example, but if you know there’s a Vino Cap that perfectly lines up the flavour in your wine to match the spicy Thai dish then heck, you’ll give that a go. Easy and well defined, something that consumers go for.

It’s only early days for the Vino Cap but winning the Brancott Estate winexplorer innovation challenge has brought the brothers from Vinnovate closer to realising their dream. As  Joshua Schmidt, Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Vinnovate says “We formed Vinnovate in 2012 with the idea of wanting to positively change how people enjoy wine. The whole experience of the winexplorer innovation challenge has really validated the idea for us. Having the opportunity now to take this further, and potentially bring it to market, it’s an incredible feeling and we are really thankful to Brancott Estate for running this challenge”.

Well good luck to them! You never know if these sort of things will take off but if one day you come across a screw cap that drops flavours and aromas into your wine thus enhancing your wine experience you know exactly where the idea came from.

Make sure to check out the video of the winners from Vinnovate here and you can read about all five winexplorer finalists in our previous blog post here.

We’d love to know your thoughts on this innovation so please comment away!

Author: Conrad

Disclosure: The Wine Wankers are working in partnership with Brancott Estate to help let the social media world know about the winexplorer challenge.