Wine is considers to be one of the most social beverages, therefore social and digital media take wine drinking to the next level. With over 400 iphone apps, 1300 wine-tasting related blogs, 7,000 wine related tweets a day, 700 Wineries have a facebook page with an average of 703 fans and lets not forget that over 700,000 people watch wine related videos a month on youtube. Between the technological digital media advances along with viniculture advances the wine community has come a long way since the first written account that we have of it: the Bible. I sat down to talk to my Uncle Daniel Bosch the Senior Viticulturist at Constellation Wines US about how digital media and technology has affected the wine industry.
Consellation Wines US (CWUS) is the largest wine company in the United States. This is based upon sale dollar value, and the leading premium wine supplier in the US. They own nineteen wineries in the United States alone, twenty wineries along with Distilleries in Canada, and twenty other Vineyards and Distilleries in Australia, Europe, South Africa and New Zealand. Needless to say Daniel’s job is a big one; and one that he deals with a rich sense of humor, an excellent pallet and by being extremely technologically savvy.
When I sat down to talk to him on the phone it was strange to not be sitting across the table from him with glasses of Chardonnay in our hands; surrounded by family and friends. He is as busy as he ever was with Beth his daughter who just graduated from UCLA Law, Jimmie his oldest son receiving his Phd from UC Davis and going off to teach at Princeton in the fall and Nick his middle son finishing up Medical School in New York. He’s driving and using his bluetooth and blackberry on his way back from Monteray Bay to his home in Fairview Ca about a twenty minute drive to his work in Napa. I started off asking him when he first started noticing the shift in technical surges in the industry, and his answer took me back to big laptops and large mobile phones “In the early to mid 1990’s was when most of it began. Email was starting to become much more common”.
The first work Mondavi did with Nasa was in the mid 1990s. They developed satellite images or vintners that showed where the best grapes of their crop where located in the vineyards. Along with showing the vintners the health of their overall crop the photos are shot from 400 miles in space. These were used to monitor water irrigation patterns, leaf sizes and any green variable in between. I did some digging on goggle for old articles on the Mondavi-Nasa project and found a photo of my uncle in the vineyard and a quote from the Los Angeles Times. "There were portions of the vineyard that were previously not used for our higher quality wine," says Daniel Bosch, Mondavi vineyards technical manager. "But now the wine from some of those same blocks will be used in our reserve program. That's a big step for us."
Back in 2011 I asked Daniel if they were currently working with Nasa on anything new and he responded with “ We are still working with NASA but on a different project. This project uses satellite imagery and a model to predict irrigation amounts. They are also working with other crops. The USGS recently made the satellite imagery free to the public, so they are now developing additional uses for it.” The work done with NASA even though it was awhile ago has changed the way growers all over the world harvest the 20 millions acres that make up the world’s wine and the 10,000 different kinds of grape vines!
In the harvesting industry today most growers use mechanical pickers and more machine related tools as opposed to digital ones. However this does not mean that the wine industry hasn’t been affected by the digital revolution. The last count for the number of wine apps available was 452. The top ten are : Snooth Wine pro, AG Wine, Hello Vine, Pair it, Dynnc Wine Pro, Wine Events, Wine Wherever, Wine Notes, Wine Enthusiast Guide, and Cor.kz. These apps range from the price of free to $4.99. Cor.kz is the most popular, or well known among the public.
When I spoke to Daniel about the “app-peal” of the app world he said that in fact his company is getting ready to launch a luxury wine app! I feel that this app is definitely for the wine connoisseur, it will have maps photos and distributors of where to find the wine or which vineries are near if you happen to be in California. This new technology that companies such as 94 wines and Cellar Key are using is called Context Sensitive Marketing (CSM or QE codes). You scan the digital barcode and some apps such as Cor.kz and Snooth Wine pro to get you all the information on the bottle, plus take you to a winery’s facebook or event page.
When I asked Daniel if he had taken a look at the wine blogging side of the industry he old me that most blogs you find are tasting related as opposed to viniculturist blogs devoted to growing. Most social media networking is now done online. Just typing vineyards or wineries into facebook thousands of “likes” and “check ins” pop up. With all of this digital media Daniel and I got into a discussion if he felt that digital media had changed the publics prefernece for certain wines? He responded by saying that he doesn’t think people’s preferences for their favorite bottle can be changed by a blog but by pallet and depending on how good the wine actually is. After I told him that acording to my research that Chardonnays were the most popular he laughed and when I finished the listed order of what wines followed he said somethings never change. (Chardonnays are the most popular followed by Merlot, Pinot Noir Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel finishing last.) It is said that 78 percent of consumers trust their peers much more then companies or adds and the top twenty wine bloggers have larger audiences then wine spectator online.
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