WINE CAPSTONES: FUTURE TECHNOLOGY
WINE’S BLEEDING EDGE OF TECHNOLOGY
“The world of fine wine is already affected by changes in technology and undergoing its own transformation, albeit slowly” Simon Pavitt
We recently curated for client the London Technology Club, the Mayfair-based community of technology investors the second in their ‘Future Technology Series’ of white papers. The latest report looked at how future technology will affect the world of fine wine.
60 guests including MWs, iconic wine estates, gathered for an interactive panel discussion and wine tasting at the home of fine wine, members club 67 Pall Mall.
To download the full 30-page report for free please CLICK HERE
The report considered three areas: technology for growers/ producers, for consumers and then for investors/ collectors.
FOR GROWERS/ PRODUCERS:
We are entering into an accelerated era of precision viticulture whereby advances in technology in fine wine making are enabling producers to make the right decisions and grow with greater precision. The wine maker of the future is as much a data analyst as a farmer. Technology is helping growers do less in the wine making process, not more.
Fine wine has come a long way thanks to technologies like blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), cryptocurrencies and spectroscopy. Heads of fine wine family businesses (notably in Europe) are retiring en masse, leading to a dichotomy between a traditionally conservative model and a new data-driven and travel-savvy generation of leaders. Some are interested in technology that helps keep closely guarded secrets and data secure, others are looking to provide total transparency to the world in all that they do.
FOR CONSUMERS:
Conscious consumers will continue in the future to want to know about how, where and why a wine is made. They want to know it’s sustainable, traceable and not counterfeit. AI will learn user’s preferences to recommend wines to purchase and provide customised advice on multi-sensory pairings to maximise the enjoyment specific to you and the fine wine (food, music, cutlery, lighting etc). Future technology is being built around two key understandings that 1) everyone has access to unlimited data and insight and 2) pleasures of the wine reside mainly in the mind, not the mouth.
FOR COLLECTORS/ INVESTORS:
Future technologies are going to look to solve two key problems for the industry: counterfeiting and finding faulty wine but to verify and test a wine requires taking the cork out.
It is estimated that up to 20% of fine wine is fake. Fraudulent wine could be worth as much as $3 billion at current market prices. Around 6-10% of all wine is estimated to be affected by wine faults. The largest contributor is believed to be TCA (2,4,6-Trichloroanisole, a natural chemical compound that imparts musty flavour and aroma to a wine). Such wines are often described as being “corked” or having cork taint. Technology is being developed that will be capable of detecting the presence of certain molecular compounds in unopened bottles of wine – through the glass, without the need to open the bottle or extract a sample. Marry this information with a global database allows tagging and comparisons for verification.
WE RECENTLY CONTRIBUTED TO THE FUTURE OF FINE WINE WHITE PAPER INSIGHT SERIES IN CONVERSATION WITH JANE ANSON ABOUT THE NINE MOTIVATIONS OF HNW WINE LOVERS: CLICK HERE FOR THE REPORT
TO READ ABOUT ENGLISH WINE AND CAUTIONARY CAPSTONE TALES CLICK HERE
TO READ ABOUT GRANT ASHTON’S HOME FOR FINE WINE CAPSTONE CLICK HERE