Wine is very much a product we naturally associate with artisanship – the land, craft and experience of the maker. It’s an association that is played to by the industry, with rustic imagery still a focus of marketing. Even where more ‘contemporary’ packaging design is used in visual marketing elements such as the bottle’s label design, storytelling that focuses on a combination of the influences of nature and the humanity behind the wine that harnessed them pulls the consumer back to ‘the land, elements and labour of love’ narrative.

But technology is permeating the wine industry just as much, arguably more, than any other agricultural product. From algorithms and sensors used to try and arrive at the perfect balance of tannins, fermentation aromas and tertiary flavours in a new wine, to Augmented Reality apps used to better market wines and vineyards and technology used in planting, cultivating and harvesting the grapes, winetech is a quickly growing sector.

The Wine Market Needs A Tech Edge

Wine is, and for the foreseeable future always likely to be, a huge market. In 2019 the international market for wine was worth over $370 billion and is forecast to hit almost $430 billion by 2023.

Source: Statista

But those figures mask challenges the industry faces as generations shift. Younger consumers still drink wine but increasingly favour alternatives such as crafts beers and spirits. Alcohol consumption is also generally dropping among health conscious Millennials and Gen Z-ers. In these demographics, a new generation of more sophisticated, low sugar ‘adult’ non-alcoholic beverages now also represents serious competition.

That’s reflected in the fact that while industry revenues continue to grow, growth is stalling. Data provided by IWSR, the alcoholic beverages market data company, showed that last year wine consumption in the USA, the world’s biggest market, fell for the first time in 25 years. The cause was attributed to “changing generational habits”.

Source: Statista

Increased competition from other alcoholic and non-alcoholic alternatives has seen the wine industry rely increasingly on data-driven algorithms to inform winemakers creating new tastes and brands that will sell. And comparison, ratings and ordering apps that let consumers buy wine in the way they have become used to with other consumer goods are proliferating.

Oversupply problems are another issue growers are contending with. Large producers are beginning to turn to AI to analyse data to predict production yields and harvest timings in an attempt to more closely match grape volumes planted with predicted yields and demand.

In viticulture, a lack of labour is now a real problem for many wine producers in developed economies. Even in less economically developed regions such as Eastern Europe, local vineyards are struggling to hire labour due to migration trends that have seen much of their former resource up sticks for better pay further west. Technology is being increasingly relied upon to pick up the slack.

Specialist wine tech is also helping towards more efficient use of resources such as water, fertilisers and pesticides. Climate change leading to either water shortages or damagingly heavy rainfalls and increasing risks such as fungi infestations that can devastate whole vineyards are part of the catalyst. But so is the increased importance that especially younger consumers attach to the sustainability credentials of the products they choose to buy.

What Kinds Of Technology Does The Wine Industry Now Use?

Technology used by the wine industry can be roughly grouped into a handful of broad categories:

Viticulture Tech – increasing or improving the quality of grape yields in a changing climate and making more efficient use of resources with a view to both improving the economics of wine production and mitigating its impact on the environment.

Winemaking Tech – or ‘vinification’ to give the process of turning grape juice, via fermentation, into bottles of wine its technical name. Tech is used to make the production process more efficient as well as harnessing contemporary data science to craft wines that will appeal to the market.

Storage & Logistics – tech that monitors and controls cellar conditions while wine matures in barrels to smart supply chain and logistics management that then delivers bottles to market.

Sales and Marketing – from Augmented Reality apps that take wine lovers through a virtual tour of a wine or vineyards history and qualities to ratings apps and subscription and on-demand wine purchase platforms.

Home Storage and Consumption – gadgets that create professional storage conditions at home, those that keep opened bottles fresh for longer and even other that make pouring cleaner – one company, Coravin, has even created a system that allows for a bottle of wine to be poured without the cork having to be removed.

Source: CBI Insights

The Most Promising Wine Tech Products and Companies

Platfarm: the Platfarm app, described as ‘Google Maps for agriculture’, founded by British-app developer-turned-Australian-winemaker Oli Madgett:

“Allows farmers to easily integrate soil maps and sensor data into comprehensive diagrams that help them identify areas in the vineyard that need work, thereby cutting costs and improving grape quality”.

Platfarm takes satellite imagery of vineyards and turns the data into actionable insights.

VineScout: a solar-powered autonomous robot, VineScout is a vineyard monitoring robot being developed by a pan-European consortium of wine estates, including Symington Family Estates, the Anglo-Portuguese port dynasty. The robot shuttles up and down vines, measuring key metrics such as “water availability, vine leaf/canopy temperature and variations in plant vigour”.

Fernando Alves, R&D viticulture manager at Symington explains:

“In monitoring our crops, we need a lot of manpower and boots on the ground.”

Mr Alves hopes that in addition to what it currently does, VineScout will soon also be able to take over the human labour-intensive process of the dawn vine-sampling that vineyards conduct to determine if grapes have reached optimal harvesting condition.

Mr Alves and Symington are also working with German researchers to adapt a machine harvester that can pick grapes on steep hills.

Evapotranspiration technology: with climate change leading to dryer conditions in California’s wine country in recent years, Vino Farms teamed up with Tule Technology. Vino Farms now uses innovative sensors developed by Tule to measure the amount of water vapour its vines are giving up. AI-powered analysis of the water vapour data then offers water management recommendations.

Chris Storm, Vino Farms’ director of viticulture comments: “when Tule came up with the evapostranspiration technology, it was a big leap in precision”.

Fungal Disease Detection & Treatment: fungal diseases which can devastate vineyards tend to thrive in extreme conditions and are becoming more common as a result of climate change. Technological solutions being developed include using sniffer dogs trained to detect fungal infestations in vines.

Sigredo Fuentes, an associate professor of digital agriculture, food and wine at the University of Melbourne has developed a system that sees specially trained dogs carrying a GPS system attached to a smartphone app. When the dogs find infected sections of vines, they remain nearby so staff can track them and deal with problem zones in a vineyard.

Nowegian start-up Saga Robotics has team up with David Gadoury, professor of plant pathology and microbe biology at Cornell University to develop the Thorvald system, that use ultraviolet light to kill fungi, while leaving vines healthy.

Winerytale: an Augmented Reality app, Winerytale is financially supported by participating wineries and is free to use by consumers. The app scans a label and then offers an Augmented Reality experience that walks drinkers through details of the wine, vineyard and maker.