Technological Changes in Winemaking

Technology has made its way into all aspects of business, and the wine industry is not too far behind.

Fremont, CA: Manufacturing wine and other grape-based fermented beverages as a species started thousands of years ago. Smash the grapes, add yeast to the mixture, and let it ferment until it reaches the desired flavor and the alcohol level hasn't altered much throughout the years.

However, even recent technological advancements have changed our feelings about winemaking. What is the Effect of Technology on the wine industry?

Irrigation management: The wine business is at risk of being shattered by climate change. Because of droughts in some of the world's top wine regions, growers must guarantee that their grapes receive adequate water.

Vineyard owners can use drones to examine the state of their crop and identify the optimal times to water rather than constantly watering and drowning the vines. These drones can also read each plant's photosynthetic activity to evaluate its health.

Advanced processing: A lot of the winemaking process used to be done by hand, but that's no longer possible when vineyards need to produce hundreds of thousands of bottles yearly to keep up with demand. Compressed air is now a significant aspect of the winemaking process, helping with everything from grape pressing to bottling the completed product.

Extensive vineyards use 68% of their energy from compressed air, whereas small wineries use 36%. This Technology may not appear significant to you, but it permits even tiny, privately held vineyards to stay up with consumer demand.

Yield forecast: Harvesting & processing a crop was once the only way to determine how much wine it would generate. Vineyard owners could make projections, yet with so many variables to consider — from the weather to the irrigation and fertilizer employed, pests, and other problems—making an exact prediction was impossible.

Even though sentinel species were planted around the field to anticipate the yield, the accuracy would only be 60 to 70%. Vineyard owners no longer have to presume how much a harvest will yield. Alternately, they can enter the information into a computer program to perform all the calculations. These machine learning ways can forecast a crop's yield with 80 to 90% accuracy if given enough data.

Gauging smoke contamination: A brush fire can taint an entire crop with smoke, although the vineyard does not burn. The wine produced from these smoked grapes has an awful flavor. Earlier, the only method to tell if a crop was destroyed was to invest in expensive laboratory testing, yet drones can now do a similar job in a fraction of the time. Since smoke-damaged vines register at various temperatures than healthy ones, vineyard owners can save the rest of the crop by removing the affected vines.