An innovative bottle closure with the potential to significantly reduce wine allergies is being developed in Australia’s most famous wine region.
Barossa Valley brothers Joshua and Simon Schmidt started their south Australian company Vinnovate in 2012 and have developed a bottle closure that releases a solution to reduce the impact of preservatives or add subtle flavours to wine.
When activated, by pressing a button on top of the screw cap, the solution is mixed with the wine and binds to free sulfites, removing their preservative properties and reducing their ability to cause a reaction.
The Vinnovate invention has beaten more than 100 Australian and New Zealand industry innovations to take out the Brancott Estate Winexplorer Challenge.
Co-founder and chief innovation officer Joshua Schmidt said: “We believe that the Winexplorer Challenge has validated our idea and it now gives us a springboard from which to go forward.
“We’ve found from a lot of market research that more and more people are experiencing a reaction when they drink wine and it’s actually pushing people away from the industry.
“We wanted to create something that was very similar to an existing screw cap but has an element of functionality because across the wider consumer goods space there is a strong trend towards individualisation.”
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