The highest-earning wine-related project to date on Kickstarter, Üllo is a revolutionary new wine purification product that removes sulphites, restoring wine to its natural, preservative-free state. We spoke to CEO James Kornacki about Üllo, the concept and his crowdfunding experience.
Tell us about Üllo. What inspired its creation?
Üllo removes sulfites from wine, and it’s the first product to do that. Sulfites are a preservative that’s added to wine during production to keep it from turning to vinegar during shipping and storage, and they’re the only unnatural chemicals in wine. While they’re essential to the winemaking process, their job is done the moment you open a bottle, and Üllo gives you the option to remove them at that point. Like many others, my aunt is sensitive to sulfites, and she inspired me to create this solution.
How did you create Üllo and how long did it take?
I developed Üllo’s proprietary technology, Selective Sulfite Capture, during my graduate years at Northwestern University [in Illinois] completing my doctorate in organic chemistry. My focus there was epigenetics, which looks at the ways in which environment, including environmental chemicals, change the expression of our otherwise “hardwired” genome, often in unexpected and counterintuitive ways. To me the parallels to wine sulfites were obvious. In wine you have hundreds, if not thousands, of bioactive compounds known to contribute to health and longevity, yet their positive effects may be masked by this known toxin – sulfites. To remove sulfites from wine was not difficult, but to develop a method of doing so without removing the other compounds in wine – that is with selectivity – was the real challenge. That alone took me over two years, before I even began developing the consumer product to deliver the technology.
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