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 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 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 Distelleries in Austraila, Europe, South Africa and New Zealand. Needless to say Daniel Bosch's job is a big one.
When we sat down to talk on the phone it was clear he was busy as ever, driving in the car using his bluetooth and blackberry. After twenty-eight years of experience in the industry when did you first start noticing a shift in the technical/digital media surge in the industry? “ Around the early to mid 1990’s was when most of it began. Email was much more common and Mondavi started working with NASA.
“For the Mondavi project, NASA used a digital camera flown on an airplane about 14,000 feet over Napa and Sonoma counties to create a special “vegetation index” using information from the visible and near infrared parts of electromagnetic spectrum.”
In 1993 the images from the space agency helped Mondavi growers detect an infestation of phylloxera- a plant louse that attacks the root of grapevines; plaguing the California wine industry a year before the symptoms would have become obvious in standard air photos. With the remote sensing images you can see what parts of the plant have similar density or vigor. The fields now can be divided in designated areas that can be sampled on the ground for maturity, then harvested separately.
“In the past, Mondavi had harvested an entire vineyard block at once based on an estimate of general ripeness, but some grapes would be over-ripe when harvested and others under-ripe. Remote sensing lets us know when to harvest which segments of the fields at different times to correspond with optimal ripeness.” What about today? are winearies still using this technology in partnership with NASA?
In todays harvesting industry the equipment growers are using according to Bosch is mostly mechanical and less digital. However that does not mean that the wine industry hasn’t been affected by technological advances. Bosch says that because of many software advances a lot of meetings are held online. Most of the time we use Cameras but it can be a bit distracting at times if it is just a conference call. You don’t often know if people are multitasking or if they have given you your full on attention.
Often times Bosch does presentations in front of growers in the industry showing them online resources and he says that most of the time his presentations are in some digital media form or another. “It’s nice to have a connection with people in person; not only do you know that people are paying attention but I feel that training done in person is much more effective then with online programs. Which is what most of the companies in the wine industry are using or their sexual harassment training and IT training.
Today if you go online to wine blogs you find that there are more tasting blogs then vineyard blogs, most social media networking is done online. Just typing vineyards or wineries into facebook thousands of “likes” and “check ins” pop up. When I asked Bosch if he thought the digital media has changed the publics view on certain wines due to popular online discussion he said no. And then laughed when I told him Chardonnays were the most popular followed by Merlot, Pinot Noir Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel finishing last. It’s 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.
This makes sense though if I want to find luxury wine along with higher end maps, photos and distributors; I’ll use the one Daniel’s company is getting ready to launch as opposed to reaching for a website or magazine. This new technology which companies such as 94Wines and Cellar Key are using is known as Context Sensitive Marketing (CSM or QR codes). With just a little digital barcode it can give you all the information on the bottle, plus take you to the winery’s facebook or event promotion! This I approve of minus the fact that I know how to pick out good wine. However I don’t believe in virtual wine tasting.
But the folks at Tastoria do! Tastoria is titled as “A Fresh Approach to Discovering Wine” and they describe themselves as a unique media company that produces and broadcasts live online wine tasting events and they disperse wine related videos over the internet. Different members can signs up to host the virtual sessions and share their knowledge. In my opinion this is a bit over rated; get your butt to the vineyard and take in the smell of the soil and the beauty of the vines. For those of us who want to taste more when we go out to restaurants and bars the new tool, which goes hand in hand with the ipad is SmartCellar! SmartCellar operates wirelessly on a secure intranet installed through an onsite server that allows customers to browse a restaurants wine selection. You can browse wines by name, region, varietal and price; the device can also include premium liquors, beers, specialty cocktails, food pairings, and not to mention menu items. This saves trees as well as apparently makes it easier on your waiter and waitress.
In addition to restaurants going digital in the wine industry there are quite a number of companies working to increase the wine industries reach digitally. Vin Tank is one of these such companies with such an idea. They define themselves on there website as “a digital think tank for the wine industry and a group of restlessly intelligent individuals with a dream to bring wine closer to technology in order to score new opportunities for marketing and selling wine in a digital world”.
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