Editor's note: On July 1, Starbucks said it would close 600 stores in the U.S.—more than the 100 previously announced.

Project Ferrari is what it’s called around the Starbucks Center in Seattle. For the past several months, behind locked doors on the sealed-off seventh floor of corporate headquarters, they’ve worked on it. Few people have ever seen the stuff, and almost no one has tasted it. And suddenly here it is, swirls of yellow, red, white, and purple in parfait cups, bathing in grapefruit or blueberry juice, or espresso. Two of Howard Schultz’s “partners”—that’s what Starbucks calls its roughly 200,000 employees—approach the door to his office, carrying the cups on silver trays. “Come on in!” Schultz shouts at them cheerfully.

The substance does not yet have a name, at least in English; the fellow who came up with “Starbucks” 37 years ago is on the case. Early this year, shortly after Schultz had resumed the post of C.E.O. at the company he’d built from a small chain of coffeehouses into an international colossus, he received word that a magical new drink had been discovered in a small Italian town. He promptly dispatched a trusted aide—one of several who had rejoined him since his return—to see if it matched the hype. “You’ve got to get over here,” the man promptly reported back. “I think we have the next Frappuccino!”

Italy has been good to Schultz. As most Starbucks baristas know, it was in Milan, barely 25 years ago, that he had his famous epiphany, the one that convinced him that he should bring the Italian espresso bar to what sometimes seems like every crossroads in America. In the company’s more recent past, it might have taken a year or two before anything came of such a suggestion. At today’s Starbucks, though, no one is waiting around: Within 48 hours, Schultz and seven associates were en route to Italy aboard a corporate jet, and within a few weeks, the deal had been struck. The no-name half-drink half-dessert will be in Starbucks stores in California this summer and all over the place by next year. “Thank you, guys!” Schultz shouts as the two depart. Pour Your Heart Into It, he called his 1997 corporate autobiography. And pour his heart into it is precisely what Schultz now does. (View slideshow.)

“You got a real treat!” he tells me. “You’ll love this. Take this one first. Try that one!” He stops and samples some. “Oh, it’s so good,” he whispers. “Tell me this isn’t, like, over-the-top! Is that fantastic? We haven’t released the name. Or what’s in it. But it’s unique.” He turned to a different cup. “This is what the Italians call affogato, which is espresso on top of this.” He tastes it. “Completely different flavor. But fantastic.” He tastes some more. “Oh, God! It’s so unique and fantastic. This is what we have to keep doing. We have to keep pushing the envelope around innovation. This has juice in it. Isn’t it fantastic? Taste the fruit one! This is so refreshing! It’s refreshing and indulgent at the same time!” (And, he points out, it’s low-cal.) Sure, he concedes, the coffee purists—the same cynics who are forever declaring that Starbucks has lost its soul—will sneer. “But we’re in the business for our customers. And they’re going to love this!” (View an interactive look at the growth of the Starbucks chain.)

“Howard Schultz enthused” may be redundant. But it is also something to see, and these days he’s more than enthused; he’s reinvigorated. “I’m energized, and believe it or not, I’m excited by this,” he says. The this here is not the (my best guess) frozen yogurt with ground ice and various flavorings that we’ve just consumed, but the sudden, shocking end to the long and gilded age of Starbucks, which in the past year and a half has seen earnings drop, the number of customers diminish, the stock lose more than half its value, and activist investor Nelson Peltz take a stake. “In a very perverse way,” he says, “if someone said to you, ‘You hoped this would happen?’ No, absolutely not. But there’s a piece of me that is embracing this underdog thing where people are counting us out, because they’re going to be wrong. I promise you that. They’re going to be wrong.”