Tech, olive oil, and wine entrepreneur Tim Bucher has a new baby: TastingRoom Inc., a startup that produces sample-sized tastes of wineries’ wares in tiny 50-milliliter bottles.

That may seem like an unlikely line of business for an executive who has worked directly with tech legends Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell. But TastingRoom uses clean-room technology to make sure the wines aren’t tainted by oxygen or other contaminants when transferred from larger containers to small sample bottles.

The nascent company has manufacturing and shipping facilities near the Sonoma Airport and marketing and engineering functions in Los Altos, California, along with about 50 winery clients, mostly in Napa and Sonoma counties, says Bucher, TastingRoom’s founder and CEO. He won’t disclose this year’s expected revenues, but predicts TastingRoom will boast roughly $20 million in revenue by 2011.

To build the business, he’s using startup capital in the “many millions,” Bucher said, from VC firm Camp Ventures and other unidentified companies and individuals. “We’ve been operating in stealth mode,” Bucher told the San Francisco Business Times. “We’re just now in the coming-out phase.”

Initial clients include Healdsburg, California’s Seghesio Family Vineyards, Oakville, California’s Nickel & Nickel Single Vineyard Wines, and Napa Valley, California’s Domaine Carneros. Seghesio uses the kits to introduce consumers to its wines and as a sales tool with retailers and distributors, while Nickel & Nickel, whose wines typically sell from $90 to $400 or more, offers a sample kit for $145 that includes six small samples and a regular-sized 750ml bottle of one of the sample varieties.

Pete Seghesio, Seghesio’s CEO, said the first shipment of kits to consumers and members of the wine trade in December was “very well received,” with many “blown away” by the convenience of the concept.

Seghesio is doing a second run next month, “sending 300 to wholesale customers and 300 to our online customers,” he said.

Bucher owns Trattore Wines and Dry Creek Olive Co., both in Healdsburg, California, and previously worked in senior roles at NeXT, Microsoft, Dell, WebMD, as well as his startups Zing and Mirra. He was Dell’s vice president of software and entertainment content before launching TastingRoom and says he’s taken one company public and sold four others for more than $1 billion.

He holds patents in tech fields like networking technology, computer design, and multimedia, and has one pending for TASTE (total anaerobic sample transfer environment), the technology the company says transfers wine to small containers without fear of contamination.