What Wine Industry can learn from Smart City technology
If you want to use digital technologies for winemaking and wine marketing, you have firstly ask yourselves what kind of problem they can solve. One way to get at least some answers is to find examples and similarities, such as that of Smart City, the intelligent city.
Smart City and Wine Industry
The concept of Smart City was born in 2010 to indicate all those technologies that, together, can make a city more usable by its citizens; easy access services for everyone and real-time alerts in case of problems, from a traffic jam to the health of the plants along the avenues.
The same concept can also be extended to a vineyard, thus taking it from Vineyard to Smart Vineyard, and of course also to any agricultural practice. Of course, digital systems are also helpful for consumers themselves to help them make choices and improve the transport and tracking phase.
So let’s see what are the 6 main technologies in a Smart City, and how to use digital technologies for wine.
Knowledge
In a Smart City, objects recognize people and know one each other; an example is the bike-sharing service, where with a personal token each inhabitant has the possibility to borrow a bicycle, use it and pay automatically. The bicycle knows that I have paid to do 100 km a month, or 10 a day. In the same way, the individual vines can be recognized in the vineyard, and their token will record information on their state of health and ripening of the grape, the treatments, of previous diseases, yielded during previous years. This information will then be used by unmanned self-propelled devices which, based on this information, will be able to make certain decisions. For every single plant.
Location
Our smartphones track our every move, with timely alerts when there is an impediment on the road, or by having the car for the car-sharing service ready. In the vineyard, each plant will be perfectly localized, with the possibility of having precise monitoring data for each vine; by locating each plant exactly, it will be possible to send an autonomous tractor directly to those coordinated to carry out any treatment or selective pruning.
Detection
Sensors in a smart city make it possible to turn street lamps on or off according to car traffic, or to set traffic lights to green when an emergency vehicle must pass. In the vineyard, the detection sensors measure various parameters of interest to the agronomist; they record them and send them to populate the database which will constitute the data reservoir for real-time analysis or for subsequent checks. In the event of special events, such as a sudden drop in temperatures, the appropriate solutions can be taken in time.
Transactions
In a modern city nowaday it needs only our smartphone to access paid services; thus also the transactions made in the cellar, from the payment of the suppliers to the retail sale of the bottles to the visitors, can take advantage of the convenience and safety of the current economic transaction systems. Checking the status of the shipment will be made secure by IoT devices that will also record the environmental conditions throughout the journey of the bottle, ensuring that the contents have not been tampered with and making scams complicated. Having secure and fast payment methods reduces the bureaucracy of issuing and recording invoices and also simplifies relations with customers.
Connectivity
Finding a wi-fi network in the city is no longer a science fiction thing; the development of broadband and 5G services will make it possible to no longer have connectivity problems even in vineyards where today it is difficult to make just a phone call. With these transmission systems you will be able to be connected with your customers, for example by sending a video of the operations in the vineyard in real time, or by being able to access the statistical data of your vineyard stored in the cloud.
Integration
The challenge now is in the integration of the various platforms, the search for a communication standard that allows various services to work together to achieve the best results. The solutions that technology companies are making available to wineries will have to find a unique way to communicate and exchange data. From unmanned tractors to drones, from weather stations to Data Analytics platforms, from comments on social channels to the sales database, everyone will have to be able to talk together to improve the offer to their customers, save time and spend more time working in the vineyard.
It is not certain that all these methodologies can be applicable in the work of a winery: it depends on the size of the company, the type of wine and customers, on its target market. However, between those who will use these technologies and who don’t, sooner or later we will begin to see a big difference, in the way of facing the markets or opening up to new initiatives. The possibilities that a winery has to promote its wine and its territory, to improve knowledge of the grape variety, to be able to make the right decisions at the right time, today are dozens of times greater than those of just ten years ago.
It will be up to the winegrower to know how to take advantage according to their needs and to use digital technologies for wine, to produce and distribute it.
I write also on thedigitalwine.substack.com newsletter
