How Wine Went High-Tech

Have you ever thought about how difficult it is to bottle champagne?

I hadn’t.

Turns out, it’s quite the challenge.

There is a lot more pressure in a champagne bottle than there is in the average car tire, and glass can be a little brittle.

We see this when we open a bottle, of course. The carbon dioxide in the bottle can’t escape due to that obdurate cork, so it dissolves into the liquid.

When the cork is removed, this bottle-based balance is disturbed and the carbon dioxide rushes to escape. It just fizzles.

It has taken centuries for champagne producers to get this right.

A French monk called Dom Perignon (yes, him from all those rap songs) ‘discovered’ champagne in the 17th century. The big bosses at the monastery loved the taste of the wine but didn’t have much time for the bubbles. For one thing, the bottles kept exploding in the cellar.

Centuries later, champagne cellar workers still wore huge iron masks as protection against the explosions.

There is an art to making wine, no doubt, and its Delphic mystique can never truly be bottled.

However, even the most quixotic among us will admit that it is primarily a science.

Without the intervention of technology, we’d still be iron-clad in the cellars, battling through shards of glass, praying for a few champagne bottles to survive. People would have written verse about wine, but it would be more at home in the war poetry section than the romantic tunes we have come to know.

Technology has helped develop more effective processes for disgorging (removing the yeast from) sparkling wine, corking the bottles, and storing them in the right conditions. In the 21st century, iron masks are very rare indeed in wine cellars.

Nonetheless, accidents do happen. In fact, Moët & Chandon still loses one bottle out of every sixty to the uncouth act of explosion.

Today, the wine remains close to its earthy roots.

From the vintners tasting the soil before planting their grapes to the drinkers glugging the final product, wine is emotional, conceptual, even intellectual.

It is also a big business.

The global wine industry was valued at approximately USD 302.02 billion in 2017 (Zion Market Research), with France and Italy the biggest producers. The United States wine industry has ballooned from just over $30 billion in 2002 to more than $60 billion today.

Many winemaking processes have been mechanized to improve the quality and consistency of output, but they are not the core focus of this article.

Instead, we will look at how wine’s relationship with technology has matured in the 21st century.

We can categorize these areas as follows:

- Trend analysis: In other words, knowing which wines to make and how to get them in front of the right customers.

- Terroir: Climate, soil, geography, farming practices, and so on. Growing and selecting the grapes, really.

- Harvest: When and how to pick the precious grapes.

- Bottling: You guessed it, putting the wine in the bottles and sending them off.

- Perception: How we find and appreciate new wines.

Admittedly, my research into the topic has lacked the clarity of a well-run production line. Some mechanical intervention would have been welcome.

I have toured a couple of cellars, asked a number of naive questions, and read about well over 100 technologies — some good, some entirely pointless.

I aim to take all of those ideas and distill them into a wonderful vintage.

If the below reads poorly, remember that such things need time. Come back to it in 20 years and you’ll come to appreciate the subtleties.

Trend Analysis

At first glance, the wine industry is ripe for big data analysis.

It is a popular drinks category worldwide; producers have historical records of their harvests and sales, and wines contain a complex blend of chemicals.

With the right data available, Machine Learning could help answer a number of pressing questions, such as:

• Are younger generations drinking as much wine as their parents did?

• Which wines will people want to drink in a few years’ time?

• Which grapes should I plant, given the qualities of my soil?

• Why does this Merlot taste of vanilla?

This cold, probing approach is still alien to many vintners, however.

Rather than responding to audience preferences, they seek to shape tastes.

As one put it in a Harvard Business Review article, “There’s no point in me asking the audience what they want, because they don’t know until I show it to them.” For someone so keen on setting trends, this guy sure likes to mimic Steve Jobs.

There is merit to this opinion, but the sheer effectiveness of big data is starting to win favor. After all, Napa Valley and Silicon Valley are not so far apart.

Wine Trends Technology

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy

A catchy name for a highly effective technique.

So effective, in fact, that is responsible for isolating the source of the passionfruit aroma in a Sauvignon Blanc.

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy involves placing a substance in a magnetic field, then using radiation to identify chemical compounds.

If winemakers understand the compounds in their wines — and the effect that they have on the senses of their audience — they can experiment with innovative new ideas.

Of course, it also helps to know what the audience likes to drink.

Companies like Enolytics aim to use technology to bring big data to small winemakers. They can take historical data from wine-drinking trends to model future patterns, which winemakers can use to plan ahead. If they know which chemical compounds deliver the desired flavors, they can select the appropriate grapes.

For those that like to get hands-on with their own data, there are plentiful resources out there for the wine industry. Google’s Data Set Search offers hundreds of resources on global wine trends, for example.

Label Analytics

In what is a mercilessly competitive market, winemakers are understandably keen to gain an advantage. Label Analytics focuses on the analysis of wine labels (their own name does what it says on the label, I guess) to understand what drives consumers to make a purchase.

Some of this is rudimentary psychology, but it also goes deeper to tell us about the flavor profiles that appeal most.

People associated the sticker with lower quality and were much less likely to buy it, even though its contents provided proof of its caliber.

Maybe the vintners aren’t always right.

Terroir

Terroir is a wonderfully French term, in that wine types still can’t agree on precisely what it means. We even lack the nous to translate it into English.

For our purposes, we are dealing with the climate, soils, and terrain of a region, and how these elements affect the taste of wine. Terroir, for all its vagueries, is certainly snippier.

The creation of wine is steeped in romance. To cede control of the means of production to an army of robots would remove that age-old connection between vintner and terroir.

See, unlike most other industries, wine remains highly fragmented. There are over 1 million growers in Italy alone, for example. Consider how many wine options are on your supermarket shelves, compared to the toothpaste section.

In other countries, such as Australia, ‘Big Wine’ is starting to take over. Brands like Jacob’s Creek (owned by Pernod Ricard) create a ruthlessly homogeneous, crowd-pleasing range of fruity wines at approachable prices.

Andrew Jefford, a British wine journalist, has described big Austrlian wines as,
“The equivalent of cans of lager; standardised, consistent, reliable, risk-free, challenge-free”.

As someone who once spent an afternoon in a Brooklyn park drinking cans of rosé (they shouldn’t exist, but they do), I cannot luxuriate in the snootiness Mr. Jefford exudes. Maybe one day.

Anyway, how can winemakers use technology without quite literally losing touch with their roots?

By inviting the machines to the vineyard, must we end up with a reliable, but characterless wine?

Terroir Technology

The Burgundy ‘Hail Shield’

There is a good argument that hailstones are the worst weather. They’re cold and they hurt the face.

I’m not the only one to hold this opinion: the whole region of Burgundy, in France, agrees with me.

In 2017, they installed a ‘hail shield’ that shoots heated silver iodide at storm clouds to prevent the formation of hailstones.

No, honestly.

The generators cover 42,000 hectares of wine-growing land and, when there is a 40% chance of hail or higher, they are turned on. They heat particles of silver iodide and send them up into the clouds to stop hail from forming before it can hit the ground and damage the vines.

Some purists think Burgundy is ‘cheating terroir’ with this approach, but you can’t please everyone.

Ted

Château Mouton Rothschild uses a robot called Ted, developed by Naïo Technologies, to help with labor-intensive tasks like tilling the soil and killing weeds.

New, electric robots have helped the winery reduce its use of chemical treatments by 30% since 2008 and Ted is its latest addition to the team.

The company’s Managing Director, Philippe Dhalluin, said in an interview with Decanter.com, ‘Ted will be able to relieve [our workers] of some of the repetitive tasks but a robot will never replace the human hand [which is] essential for a perfect, high-quality harvest.’

Despite his eco-friendly credentials, some wonder whether Ted’s real purpose is to replace laborers, who are particularly expensive in France.

This appears to be the future, either way.

Symington Family Estates, a large producer of Port wines, uses a ‘vine scout’ to identify the ideal places to plant each grape variety, and drones are in common use above the larger French vineyards today.

Harvest

Vintners are a picky bunch, and why not?

Deciding when to harvest the grapes is a delicate and costly decision.

Grapevines exhibit a seasonal variation in yield of 32.5%, a number that rises each year along with our planet’s temperature. If technology can reduce that number even a little, the impact would be significant.

Fortunately, there are some specific areas where

To make wine, a certain percentage of the fruit must be dead. The deterioration of these cells is what creates the delicate flavors we all know and love.

In these times of precision, we now know what this percentage is for each grape variety.

One California winery decided to eschew everyday data scientists and enlist the best in the business to help with harvesting.

Wine Harvest Technology

NASA

The Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley has partnered with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (yep, NASA) to add some space-age cool to the age-old art of winemaking.

NASA used remote-sensing technology to capture images of vineyards from above, with the aim of measuring factors such as soil drainage, ripening rate, and the presence of disease.

NASA image

Tim Mondavi described the results as “astounding”, as they went beyond detecting current patterns to predict which grapes would produce the best wines from the harvest.

They also knew exactly when to harvest each of the micro-regions in the vineyard, without resorting to the ancient ‘rules of thumb’ vintners have traditionally used.

This is combined with on-the-ground technology to help the winemakers see which grapes are ready, without needing to pick and send them for testing. These handheld devices use near-infrared wavelengths to quantify the level of cell death in each grape and let the picker know whether to take or leave the grapes.

The age of Artificial Vintelligence is surely upon us.

Bottling

As Dom Perignon found out the hard way, making a great-tasting fermented grape juice is just the beginning. You need to get the stuff in bottles if you want to get out there in the market.

Admittedly, bottling still wine is less fraught with challenges than its sparkling, sometimes-shattering, sibling.

There are some repeatable processes that can be mechanized with relative ease, such as creating and labeling the bottles.

That said, a new wave of technologies reveals the intricacies that can still be found in this practice.

Wine Bottling Technologies

VinPerfect

The screw cap versus cork debate shows little sign of abating. Screw caps help preserve the flavor in white wines better than corks, many say, and they don’t allow the wine to become ‘corked’. Big clue in the name there.

For their part, corks allow a small level of ‘oxygen ingress’ that can help some wines to age, while in the bottle.

VinPerfect aims to bring this benefit to screw tops while preserving the benefits the latter can boast.

Its ‘Smart Caps’ allow for different levels of oxygen ingress, dictated by the winemaker’s preference.

As such, they can offer a higher level of security on the long-term nature of the wine. This is a bigger business than one might suppose; some wine companies invest in ‘aroma insurance’ to protect their products against the effects of the elements.

Prooftag

Wine forgery is said to have cost buyers $3 billion and there are few concrete solutions.

Forgers can refill a bottle with an imitation that is sold at auction, then stored for years before opened — if it is opened at all.

Prooftag is a technology that is applied at the bottling stage to guarantee the provenance of the contents.

A unique code is added to the seal, which cannot be broken without revealing that it has been tampered with. Consumers can scan the QR code to read about the wine’s journey, too.

Perception

Winemakers spend years fermenting and preparing their wares for sale. After so much effort, it really helps to have an audience that at least appreciates the flavor and aroma of the wine.

Most cultures throughout history have drunk wine for its other effects on our senses, albeit with a different interpretation of what these effects mean.

The ancient Persians used to debate important matters twice: once sober, once drunk. If they arrived at the same conclusion both times, the decision must surely be the correct one. The two states had equal weight; they just allowed people to see the world in different lights.

Wine tasting is an elite pursuit today, but technology is lowering the barriers to entry.

Wine Perception Technology

Tastry

Tastry asks users to take a 20-second survey, then uses this ‘palate profile’ to pair them with wines they are likely to enjoy. It’s like a dating app for wines. Vinder, you might say.

Their claim is ‘We taught a computer how to taste’, although the truth is a little more prosaic.

Many similar technologies have been applied elsewhere; this is essentially a recommender system.

What sets Tastry apart is the quantity of data required to feed its Machine Learning algorithm. It does not suffer from the ‘cold start’ problem of other systems, which only really get going once the big data is flowing.

Tastry uses a ‘small data’ approach to ask a few important questions about the user’s preferences, which are sufficient to create a profile and suggest new wines.

It works, too: consumers are 45% happier with their purchase when they use the app.

Bottling It All Up

The relationship between wine and technology is clearly complex.

The wine industry trades on tradition and, while technology has been vital for its continued growth, the good taste and judgment of the vintner have always been at the top of the hierarchy.

When we taste a wine, part of its character comes from the idiosyncrasies of its creation. Much of this is imaginary, but we are dealing with a largely conceptual pursuit here. These stories have value, or else we’re just dealing with fermented grapes in a bottle.

Technology need not be a threat, as the examples above ably show. They enhance the role of the professionals, by guiding their decisions and adding precision to their practices.

The ideal solution resides in this blend of the two arenas. Wine has always been about science and art, anyway.