Tech Innovation in the Wine Industry, Pt. 1
Amid the pandemic, the wine industry suffered tremendously – from catastrophic weather events in California, Italy and Germany and, global supply chain disruption to growing threat of price inflation. Despite the chaos, the global market for wine grew from US$326.8B to US$340.23 billion in sales in 2021. Restaurants are rebounding, off-prem sales are booming and the industry is proving its capacity for creativity, adaptability, and resilience. In 2022 and beyond, I anticipate the market to be more responsive to innovation. What does that mean though?
When you think about wine, technology doesn’t tend to come up. Wine ignites the senses and most often, you’re thinking about the flavor, smell, body and how the wine makes you feel at the moment. Moreover, science and innovation have been the foundation of grape growing and winemaking – from monks observing grapevine cycles and adjusting their practices accordingly to smart developments in fining and storage. In short, the wine industry has been generally slow to adopt new technology. It’s a “who you know” sort of business that still relies primarily on excel, poorly created websites… the list goes on. The pandemic proved to be a bright spot for wine industry though; those operating in it were forced to innovate as sales moved online. There are other pressing concerns like fraud and climate change that require a heavy investment in technology and will ultimately change how the industry operates in the future. . I’ll talk through some contemporary innovations that are pushing the business of winemaking ever forward.
IoT & Sensor Technology: Challenges in the vineyard have always been a concern for winemakers – the devastating blight of phylloxera in the 19th century is one example. Managers use different tools to improve crops, manage costs and track environmental impacts. Precision viticulture is a term that comes up, often associated with how to increase efficiency, reduce disease, and maintain quality. Predicting a vineyard’s yield is of paramount importance for winemakers. When you have an accurate yield idea, you can allocate your resources better for the season. This includes everything from water, to fertilizer, to barrels, to staff. New technologies enable producers to take historical data of the vineyard and apply it to the current wine season's early activity. Now, with climate change an increasing risk, winemakers have a myriad of other issues to consider too, and technology is stepping in to help mitigate these threats. IOT & sensor technologies are increasingly deployed in the vineyard, winery, distribution and on the bottle itself.
In the vineyard, sensors are deployed collect data on weather patterns, sun exposure, rainfall, pH, nitrogen levels, soil conditions, humidity, wind direction and speed. Drones have allowed growers to take overhead shots of their crops with thermal infrared cameras to give detailed information on the plant’s health that a regular camera could not provide. This allows the farmers to assess which vines need nourishment and spread irrigation and fertilization more efficiently. Drones with infrared light are used to determine optimal harvest time and picking order. particularly in farming and production management. IoT examples include using intelligent tracking devices to check up on the health of grapevines and the presence of invasive species. Automation is even driving the handling of soil temperatures and hydration.
Some new applications:
A winery in Oregon built UV Robot to battle the blight of potentially destructive powdery mildew
Winemakers in Burgundy are tackling extreme storms with high-tech systems that deploy particles of silver iodine into the atmosphere to form a shield against hail.
LIDAR, a remote imaging technology, allows for the structure of the vineyard to be mapped in 3D. Crop 3D modeling allows for site specific management. This promotes greater control over the processes of growing grapes and assists grape growers in meeting the demands of winemakers. It’s also used to extract biophysical parameters to monitor dynamics of vegetation, the water cycle, energy budget and other variables for decision making programs. It can also be easily incorporated into current machinery or tractors to scan the field while doing other tasks such as tillage of fertilization. The resulting information is easy and fast to process which can be incorporated into decision support systems or used for automatic pruning systems or site-specific fertilization.
Satellite Imagery: Satellite images can also be used during a period of the growing season known as véraison, a critical point in the vine’s growth when grapes turn from green to red or white. Monitoring crop vigor at this stage gives the winemaker time to modify management of individual vines with a goal of optimizing the harvest. It also allows winegrowers to optimize the decision-making process by showing the yield variability allowing them to take advantage of this variability for applying selective harvesting to increase the quality of the wine.
Cisco has an industrial IoT solution that can track temperature, light, humidity, and water availability, block by block of an estate. It offers insight into tannin development by measuring the amount of light hitting individual grapevines. This allows a winemaker to not only figure out when grapes are ready for harvest but reduces a vineyards dependence on water. This, coupled with neutron probes, can provide substantial real time data that reduces
Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) for Wine – this can be used anywhere up or downstream in the chain.
In my opinion, here are some practical applications for both:
Applying AI to different wine critic reviews to create a database that synthesizes all the different reviews to provide more clarity on taste markers and what makes a 90+ plus wine for a specific region. The goal is not to replace wine critics but to provide a more comprehensive analysis of wine for consumers.
Machine Learning & Sensory Science: analyzing tens of thousands of wines combining analytical chemistry, consumer flavor preferences, and ML to predict market performance for sensory-based products. This could help winemakers produce or enhance a style of wine (decision assistance in the winemaking process) or target their customers more efficiently.
Current Applications:
AI & Robotic Cameras: Researchers have used AI and a robotic camera to cut the time spent examining grape leaves in the lab from six months down to a single day. Until now, labs were slowed by the need to manually check thousands of grape leaves for evidence of infection. Blackbird was developed by the USDA_ARS program. It’s a robot that uses a camera to gather information from the leaves with the detail of an optical microscope. Given the detail of the information, a sophisticated analysis using deep neural networks is required to help predict the plant variety, plant stress, and mitigation techniques for many other factors in the vineyard.
AI & Blending: California winemakers are using AI to help salvage grapes damaged by smoke from the state’s massive wildfires. Ahead of harvest, dozens of vintners used AI-powered models to identify viable blending options that mask unwanted smoky flavors. Narrowing the blending options can reduce production delays and get wines onto store shelves faster, compared with the time and expertise needed to taste-test as many variations as possible. Blending in smoke-tainted grapes adds an extra layer of complexity to the winemaking process and is much more sustainable (i.e., less waste).
AI & Smoke Taint Detection: bushfires are climatic anomalies related to climate change that is severely affecting the grape growing industry. Smoke contamination and taint in wines is difficult to assess. Current assessment methods require berry or wine sample collections and specialized lab analysis that is time-consuming, cost prohibitive and more importantly, not representative of the real level of contamination within a vineyard. AI based on short and proximal remote sensing combined with ML modelling can be used to assess and monitor smoke contamination and smoke taint in wines and implemented with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and infrared thermal imagery (IRTI) to map regions of vineyards according to smoke contamination levels. Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) could offer a quick assessment for amelioration techniques to reduce smoke compounds in berries and taint in wines. E-noses have been developed to assess smoke-related gases in wines to predict smoke taint or be applied to the vineyard to monitor ambient gases and levels of smoke contamination in bushfire events.
Customer Experience (CX) and Personal Experience: Vivino has rolled out Match for You, a new app feature that provides wine drinkers with a percentage likelihood that they will enjoy a specific wine. Vivino recently raised a $150M round and announced their funding would be used to improve AI, focusing on increasing personalization. Vivino users primarily relied on the Vivino Rating, a five-star wine rating system that leverages the wisdom of the crowd to show the average score of a wine. Match for You uses ML and the insights Vivino has on each user to give each one of them a unique match score for every single wine scored in Vivino. There are match brackets that apply a % chance that you’d like the wine. I’ve found this tech hasn’t worked well and operationally, it’s a nightmare (from personal experience).
Drones & Last Mile: Last-mile delivery is not a new trend, but wine tracking apps and shipment notifications are. Getting wine to the consumer can be challenging, especially when shipping networks are at capacity and the contents are fragile. Sellers must deal with expensive packing materials while they meet unique state legalities on how and where to deliver. The addition of specialized last-mile services specific to the wine industry is becoming a real possibility for more producers. Just like Amazon has its own last-mile delivery drivers, we could see more wine-branded vans and trucks pulling up to hand-deliver those precious bottles directly to the consumer, guided by the efficient uses of tech-equipped GPS, wine inventory apps, driver guides, and optimized routing. When vans or trucks can't make the drive, there's still an option for drones. While the drone business is fraught with FAA regulation, local zoning ordinances, and the limitations on drones themselves, we're seeing it done well in some industries already. In areas where drones are embraced and normalized, the prospect of delivering a $100 bottle of bubbly in a drone-delivered basket is not farfetched and something I’d welcome on a hot summer day. In fact, it could be cheaper and safer than driving across town in rush-hour traffic for that single bottle.
Now this is only part of the technology being used and innovation in the wine industry. Join me next week while I breakdown technology in aging, robotics and my honest assessment of the software that exists in industry today.