As I approach the Covent Garden restaurant where I’m due to meet Greg Lambrecht, the affable founder and inventor of Coravin, I receive an email from his publicist explaining that he’ll be running late. ‘I’m trying to get him away from another event,’ says the one-line missive. Maybe I should be offended, but it transpires that Lambrecht was holding court with 20 sommeliers from a selection of the UK’s Michelin-starred restaurants; a Paulée-style lunch where each attendee was asked to bring a special bottle. With such curiosities flowing as Champagne Selosse Initial and sea-aged Gewurztraminer, it’s little wonder he struggled to tear himself away. It’s also a solid indication of the kind of doors that have opened for the creator of medical devices since he turned his engineering eye to wine.
Now we’re sitting down to chat – naturally, over a glass of wine – Lambrecht recalls some of these memorable moments. There was the time he got to drink 1991 Bonneau du Martray Corton-Charlemagne with the estate’s former owner, Jean Charles le Bault de la Morinière. Or the invitation he received to a castle in the Czech Republic to help draw liquid for verification from a series of ancient vessels discovered in an old reliquary; one bottle turned out to be a Corton Rouge from 1899.

‘A German sommelier in the room said, “Can we just take a moment? Everyone who made this wine is dead. Their grandchildren are probably dead. These grapes are dead. Phylloxera wiped out these vineyards. This winery no longer exists, and yet this wine is still alive. Why do we do this, in the wine industry? Making these things that live longer than we do?” And that stuck with me,’ says Lambrecht.
I quickly discover Lambrecht, 55, to be quite the raconteur when it comes to his favourite topic. Without coming across as boastful, he regales me with stories of the rare bottles and random encounters Coravin has gifted him since its launch just over ten years ago. But the story that resonates most is how this California-raised, Boston-based MIT graduate, who held absolutely no ties to the industry, soon found himself in the VIP lane of the wine world.
The chances are you’re familiar with the Coravin concept, if not through personal use, then by proximity to it on a restaurant’s by-the-glass wine list. But to understand Lambrecht’s ascension, it’s worth casting your mind back to the first time you encountered his gadget; or, better still, reviewing early praise from Robert Parker on his YouTube channel back in 2013, just before Coravin’s official release. In the footage, Parker shakes his head in delirious disbelief during Lambrecht’s demonstration of the device – before emphatically claiming that the invention is about to ‘revolutionise’ the world of wine.
Coravin came about as the solution to a simple problem: how to enjoy just one glass without having to promptly polish off the rest of the bottle, a conundrum Lambrecht faced when his wife fell pregnant with their second child. ‘When I invented Coravin, it was for myself,’ says Lambrecht. ‘I drank by the glass at home.’
I had 225 sparkling wines by the glass in my house, and it taught me that it’s almost as wide a category as still wine, if not as wide
Lambrecht, whose parents are of Austrian and German descent, was already a prolific inventor, but before Coravin his hundred or so patents pertained to improving lives in a very different sense. His first job saw him develop prosthetics, catheters and surgical tools for Pfizer. The other company Lambrecht still runs today, Intrinsic Therapeutics, focuses on an implant that aids those suffering from a herniated disc. But it was a system he’d previously developed for chemotherapy that inspired Coravin. With his handheld wine-preservation device, a medical-grade, hollowed-out needle penetrates the cork, with argon gas displacing wine from the bottle as it is dispensed. The cork remains uncompromised, and the wine safe for continued bottle ageing without the threat of increased oxidisation.
Lambrecht whips out a medical case from his bag and unveils an early prototype, something he carries around ‘nonchalantly’ on his travels (somehow making it through customs unchecked). ‘The first night I made that, I drank five different wines,’ he says. It’s quite different to the one now on the market: a rudimentary metallic object with an exposed epidural needle. At the time, his three-year-old dubbed it ‘The Mosquito’.

It surprises me to learn how long Lambrecht sat on his discovery, claiming that the contraption stayed in his cellar for 11 years. He made 15 iterations before giving the device to a friend as a wedding gift. Soon after, the requests through his network began to roll in. ‘That became the tradition: I’d make you a prototype, you’d send me the wine that you thought it was worth. And the only thing you had to promise me was feedback,’ says Lambrecht.
He was a dedicated drinker of California Cabernet, but his friends began to challenge him by asking if his device worked on Riesling, Burgundy and aged Rioja. And then further testing would ensue. ‘I still work in medicine. I don’t want to launch anything that isn’t bulletproof,’ says Lambrecht. But despite all the refining, it very much remained a concept he was perfecting for personal use, perhaps with a view to launch once he’d lived out his days in medicine.
The lens on a culture that Coravin provides me has been really fascinating
‘I was kind of dragged into Coravin,’ says Lambrecht, who claims he saw wine as a hobby, not a business. But by the time he was making 12 handsets a month for friends of friends, purely through word of mouth, an advisor for his medical implant company intervened, writing him a cheque to take Coravin to the next level.
The device as we know it officially rolled out in 2013, initially in the US, but soon after in the wine world’s capitals, with London, Paris and Hong Kong on the hit list. Lambrecht was quickly introduced to the individual quirks of each scene. ‘The lens on a culture that Coravin provides me has been really fascinating,’ he says. ‘I realised that London was like a wine capital of the world, because it’s agnostic as to source. It doesn’t care,’ he says.

The inventor wasn’t received with open arms in all quarters. ‘Two top Bordeaux wine producers walked me to the door,’ he says. ‘Bordeaux was like, “What is this evil invention you’ve created that will decrease the consumption of my beverage and result in counterfeiting?”’ Lambrecht had the opposite treatment in Burgundy, a region where wineries needed the invention the most, due to the scarcity – and price – of their wines.
There have been more surprises along the way. Lambrecht had envisaged Coravin as a device for home enthusiasts and collectors like himself, but it’s now the hospitality industry that seems most transformed by his invention. Its impact can be seen most clearly with Coravin Sparkling, a follow-up device created during lockdown that has allowed for the kind of by-the-glass opportunities that Champagne lovers have long hoped for at their favourite restaurants. Lambrecht describes it as the company’s biggest success yet.
The product had input from the influential contacts he’d made through the business so far, and he asked them for feedback on the hardest style of sparkling wine to preserve. ‘Jancis [Robinson] wrote the shortest email, but it was dead, dead nuts. She goes: “Pet nat… don’t know why you’d want to preserve it!”’ Lambrecht also worked with cases of California’s Chandon (‘the highest pressure we’ve ever measured in a bottle’) and Nani Prosecco (‘thank God it’s delicious, because I got to taste a ton of it’). But he wasn’t limited to just the three styles. ‘I had 225 sparkling wines by the glass in my house, and it taught me that it’s almost as wide a category as still wine, if not as wide.’

The difference with Coravin Sparkling is that you’re opening the bottle to begin with, before sealing it with a stopper and charging it with carbon dioxide, with the company promising up to one month’s worth of preservation time. ‘We halted our own innovation for a while because we believed that Coravin was a way of pouring wine from a bottle without opening it,’ says Lambrecht. ‘If we had stayed in our little box, we would never have freed ourselves to see what the customer wants, which is to serve any wine, any time, any quantity, without having to think of when they’re going to drink it again.’
The proof of the gadget’s impact on hospitality is visible in the very place we’re meeting, Smith and Wollensky, which plays host to Coravin’s latest initiative, The World Wine Tour. They’re pouring a range of special still and sparkling wines by the glass aided by his devices, and Lambrecht sips away in enthrallment at a 2005 Château de Fargues Sauternes. ‘I’m a closet sweet-wine lover,’ he says. Although, if you ask me, there’s nothing closeted about Lambrecht’s love of wine. It’s his most passionate talking point, and all his research has helped him amass quite the collection. ‘I still have the largest wine-by-theglass programme in the United States in my house,’ he boldly claims – and I don’t doubt it.
The next time we catch up, Lambrecht is in a much more sober setting, in his office at Intrinsic HQ, as we chat over Zoom. He’s subdued, more sedate, compared to the animated, wide-eyed wine fanatic I met just a few weeks back. We’ve had to delay our call, since he was on standby in Florida for consultation on any emergency spinal procedures that might come in the aftermath of hurricanes Milton and Helene. I ask how he juggles these seemingly conflicting lifestyles. He’s surprisingly frank. ‘A while back, I was invited to do a TED talk on life and balance. And I said I was completely comfortable doing it, as long as they were interested in the “con” opinion. Because I do not have a life and balance. I work seven days a week,’ he says.
Understandably, Lambrecht is an advocate for carving out a career in your area of interest, and he’s keen to clarify that, for him, medicine has an equal billing to wine. ‘My career advice for my sons was find the intersection between that which you’re good at and that which you’re passionate about.’ (His sons are now 28 and 25; one works in cyber security, the other in Hollywood special effects.)

Even if Lambrecht loves his work, to me it sounds like a lot of pressure. But he seems to have found an outlet that doesn’t just involve raiding the contents of his cellar. The day we first meet, he’s just come off the back of a cycling challenge in Austria where he claims to have burned 10,000 calories. (He’s more than earned that glass of Sauternes.) And in the six weeks between this encounter and our Zoom chat, he’s competed in a half-marathon in Cape Cod. He claims the endurance training keeps him both ‘fit and sane’.
This brings us neatly to a discussion around the serendipitous timing of Coravin’s launch, as a decline in global alcohol consumption is making more frequent headlines and as a trend for so-called ‘mindful drinking’ is taking hold in certain circles. As somebody who works in medicine and who focuses on his own fitness, this trend isn’t one Lambrecht can deny. ‘I wear this watch that measures my sleep. If I drink too much wine, my sleep is crap, so I’ve altered the way I drink wine to optimise my sleep.’ Rather than a challenge, these current trends pose an opportunity for Coravin, which was created in the very pursuit of ‘just one glass’. But Lambrecht does think there is work to be done in the wine world to better engage with the next generation.
I really want to create as many special experiences for people as possible
He fondly recalls his epiphany moment with wine when, at the age of 16, he was taken on an underage road trip to Napa Valley and welcomed into Peju Winery by founder Tony Peju himself, who talked through his wines as they tasted at their leisure. ‘Now, to walk into a winery in Napa Valley, you have to make a reservation, pay $185 or $250, and then you can taste through the wines. I would never have fallen in love with wine if I had been confronted by that at 16,’ says Lambrecht.
Ultimately, it’s this accessibility to beautiful drink that seems to drive Lambrecht and pushes him to keep innovating. ‘I really want to create as many special experiences for people as possible,’ he says. ‘And drinking by the glass is just more fun.’
Returning to that YouTube video from 2013, as Robert Parker waxes lyrical, a fresh-faced Lambrecht sits by his side with the goofiest of grins. It’s like he can’t believe this is happening. (Honestly, I think he’s blushing a bit.) In a moment of complete candour, he rubs his hands together, looks directly into the camera and says: ‘By the way, this is the best part of my job. I get to meet people like this.’
The fanboy energy was palpable back then. But what’s clear to me, ten years and countless glasses later, is that the glee that comes with getting to share a glass with his heroes is a privilege that is yet to be lost on Lambrecht.
Three memorable bottles from Greg Lambrecht’s collection

Ceretto Cannubi San Lorenzo Barolo 2010 (magnum)
‘This is an exceptional bottle of Barolo. It has an extremely small production, is made only in magnum and is only available to restaurants and wine bars. I am very close with the head of the winery, Federico Ceretto. His incredible support of Coravin since 2014 has made it commonplace in restaurants and wine bars throughout the country. He gave me this bottle as a gift, and I pour a glass for my spouse and me at least once a year to celebrate our friendship with him.’
Champagne Fallet-Crouzet Brut NV
‘Fallet-Crouzet also has an extremely small production (around 20,000 bottles). I met Thomas Crouzet in Reims when we launched Coravin Sparkling. He is part of the winery family and a reporter for the local newspaper, L’Union. He was the first in France to interview me regarding Coravin Sparkling, and he wrote a deeply thoughtful article. Following our interview, I went to the local wine shop to purchase his family’s wine, and I fell in love. In January, Thomas invited me to the celebration of St-Vincent, the patron saint of the harvest, at the Église St-Nicolas in Avize. It was a moving experience and a true celebration of the wonder of Champagne and the people who work so hard to make it.’
Joseph Phelps Insignia 2002
‘One of the first bottles I shared with Robert Parker, poured with him in March 2013, before we launched Coravin. Meeting Robert Parker and having him be so enthusiastic about the potential of Coravin was foundational to the success of our launch. I am lucky to call him a friend and have shared wine with him many times since. I love the wine – and indeed all the wines from this producer. I met the Phelps family early in my wine life, back when I was 21 and touring Napa.’