Hotels turn to wine on tap
The situation: You key in to your hotel room after a stressful business meeting.
All you want is an immediate glass of wine to drink while watching the evening news. The problem: You don’t want to open the full bottle of ludicrously overpriced plonk in the minibar. Room service will take 45 minutes to bring you a Saran-wrapped glass filled with Champagne that’s too warm.
A growing number of hotels have found a solution to this widespread dilemma: the Plum machine.
The size of a large espresso machine, the latest in-room luxury preserves two opened bottles of wine for weeks at the perfect serving temperature, and allows you to draw off a glass with one touch.
When it debuted as the new “essential” home wine appliance at $1 499 (R17 681.50), I admit I was unmoved. Owning one made sense only if you take days to finish off a bottle of vino or hate to open bottles yourself.
But now a great use case has really revealed itself: For hotel guests, the Plum is a godsend, even if you have to pay for each glass you drink. And a touch-screen provides a lot of information on the wine, tasting notes, and even a virtual tour of the winery, if you want.
The first hotel to capitalise on the Plum’s in-room potential was the Four Seasons in Silicon Valley, where the pace is fast and the clientele savour the latest high-tech amenities.
General manager Florian Riedel says its suites feature the Plum, and all rooms will have them by the end of 2018.
The sleek, brushedstainless cube sits nicely on a sideboard, taking up very little space for the pleasure it brings.
The mastermind behind the Plum, tech entrepreneur David Koretz, admits he started working with hotels two years, before the device was officially launched.
He enlisted engineers from Google, Amazon’s Lab 126 and Motorola to develop the technology. It uses doublecored needles to pierce the bottles’ corks, and then injects argon gas to preserve the wine.
“I initially created Plum to solve my own problem – I wanted the perfect glass of wine at a touch when I got home,” Koretz said in an e-mail. “But I quickly realised that the hotel guest’s experience was far worse.”
And he saw the market: the world’s 4 million or so luxury hotel rooms.
So far, he has made nearly a dozen deals in the US, including Miami Beach’s La Confidante, the Hyatt Unbound Collection, and the Rosewood Sand Hill near Palo Alto, which rolled out its Plum programme last month.
More are to follow, such as San Francisco’s The Clift and the Dallas Park Cities Hilton. Future brands include the St Regis and the Waldorf Astoria. International expansion is a given.
What guests most appreciate, says La Confidante general manager Keith Butz, is “the convenience”.
But since it’s so easy to swop out wine bottles in the Plum, these standard-level wines don’t have to be your only choices.
Florian Riedel explains: “When guests stay frequently, we usually know about their wine preferences, and can choose something to surprise them.”
Nice. For an additional charge, you can let the hotel know what you want to drink while you’re in residence. Very nice.
The Plum automatically keeps track of how many glasses you drink, adds the cost to your hotel bill and even notifies management when it’s time to replace the bottles.
It also fits neatly into the current tech-savvy hotel room trend. – The Washington Post.