MIKE T BARROW'S OPENVINO MENDOZA WINE CAPSTONE
In a 2019 report we wrote and published for the London Technology Club: Future Technology in Wine, we featured Mike T Barrow, the pioneering winemaker who, in 2003, gave up his thriving career in IT in the US to move to Mendoza, Argentina and start a boutique organic winery named Costaflores. Fast forward to 2021 and Mike has established the most progressive and forward-thinking winemaking lab in the world.
If you want to know what the near future of wine is now, follow Mike and Openvino.org, the world’s first opensource winery. Mike takes leading edge tech theory and puts it into practice to test and demonstrate its efficacy as well as share all the learnings. Here we explain what Mike is up to across seven interconnected initiatives that make up his wine technology Capstone:
1) WINEMAKING
Starting with the foundations… Mike’s first harvest was in 2007 after planting the vines in 2004, now providing him with 14 years of experience making wine. His wine is 100% organic, 3 co-fermented grape varieties: Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Petit Verdot. Harvest takes place at the end of March each year with 20 people over two busy days. Wine is produced in April/May. The wine needs three years aging, including one year in stainless steel or oak tanks (about 10-15% of the wine is in oak and the rest of it is in stainless steel) and two years in bottle. Here Mike’s mission is simple: to produce outstanding natural organic wine. If there is a way of bringing technology into the process- Mike will integrate; from IoT sensors, 360-degree cameras to accounting and ticketing software. Capturing data from all factors affecting the wine from the environment, temperature in the tanks, cold storage, and human effort, Mike is developing precision farming which fuels decision-making like levels of irrigation, when to harvest etc.
2) OPENVINO
The goal of OpenVino is to create the world’s first open-source winery and wine-backed cryptocurrency. Inspired by the open-source software movement, Mike is five years into this process. Mike’s mission here is to take disruptive technologies around transparency, traceability, tokenisation and provide proof of concepts. Costaflores as the wine guinea pig. The name OpenVino is because Mike publishes all activities and data on his wiki site. The sensors he has deployed in the fields are linked to blockchain for bio digital certification. Mike has a benefit mindset: he is happy to share his intellectual property of the winery to the world for extreme transparency. Mike wants to provide consumers with a new way to interact. All the data is published, sharing the ‘making of’ in the process, with block chain validating this. Taking a key from all the data, placing it in the block chain means it’s not updated or altered. Mike is optimising wine making in the grape growing, collecting feedback from customers and sharing that information with the world so others can benefit.
3) VINTAGE COIN OFFERINGS
Once Mike knows how much wine have being produced from a vintage (e.g., 16,384 bottles in 2018), the company issues a digital token for each bottle. The 2018 vintage was called MTB18. The company puts the tokens up for sale, allowing people to essentially acquire the right to one of the bottles. The buyer then has 10 years to ‘burn’ i.e., redeem the digital token. The wine takes three years before its ready to drink so in May 2021 the MTB18 vintage was made available. Whoever is holding the digital token at that point can purchase the bottle of wine through the site. This could be a consumer, an importer, a reseller, anybody in the chain and there are different incentives for different stakeholders along the way. They don’t have to order the wine at that time; they can hold the tokens, for example MTB18 expires in 2028. Mike has effectively successfully tokenised vintages.
4) OPENVINO EXCHANGE
Mike has tokenised the 2018,19,20 and 2021 vintages. The next phase for Mike was to provide an exchange for people to buy and sell the tokens, the reference currency is Ether on the Ethereum blockchain.
Mike’s phase two for OpenVino exchange is to open the platform out to other wineries to be able to do the same. Concentrating on five Argentinian wineries first, Mike will then extend to others in Spain and then beyond. Mike’s vision is to enable other wineries to do tokenisation and NFTs via the platform. He is not looking to charge others a license etc. 100% opensource. OpenVino is working with the National Wine Board of Argentina (there is only one appellation in Argentina) to help look at certifying wines, compare chemical analysis data for wines to be tokenised across the country. He expects other Argentinian wineries to be tokenising their wine in 2022. Mike has purposely built OpenVino exchange (https://OpenVino.Exchange) as modular so that other wineries can choose which modules to implement. Mike has proven the concept with MTB, now he is opening the opportunity up to other wineries to follow on the Ethereum network.
5) ‘YOU DRINK IT YOU OWN IT’
For each bottle Costaflores produces Mike also creates an NFT token unique to that single bottle. If a person drinks the bottle, they can scan a QR code on the back label that takes them through to a site where they can provide feedback on the wine. Those that provide feedback automatically become a shareholder of the company through a smart digital contract. Each NFT token associated with its unique bottle is mapped to one share of the company (through a trust corporation). You drink it, you become part owner of a vineyard in Mendoza… Mike’s belief is to provide something in return for people’s feedback. Note the data goes to a 3rd party that separates personal data and only gives the winery the feedback data. The 3rd party doesn’t share the personal data but keeps the legal corporate shares and legal information for the share distribution. Owners could then be able to trade (buy, sell, exchange) the NFT token (i.e. a share of the business).
Mike’s had however challenges with regards to the serialised label printing for the unique QR code which was prohibitively expensive to outsource printing. But his can do attitude means its just another small hurdle to overcome. Mike simply purchased and imported a label printer from the US to print out their own back labels. All elements in the process are registered on blockchain so are under decentralised management, traceable, transparent and irrefutable.
6) OPENVINO LABS
Mike now has plans to build a new three-story lab on the site of Costaflores. Mike wants to have a space to explore further software and hardware, internet of things, sensors, code development, smart contracts, image analysis etc. All on site in the lab, driving and trying ideas from a winemaker’s perspective. All again to be published on OpenVino. Mike’s latest tech pursuits include taking the bio mass from the vineyard (pruning’s, cuttings and waste material), shredding into power consistency then inoculating with mushroom mycelium to be able to create new packaging, for example multi-bottle packaging to ship the wine.
7) WINE DROP
One challenge Mike has faced with the project is the increasing success of Ethereum blockchain. When people are looking to redeem their tokens, the fees paid to transact the smart contracts (also known as ‘gas fees’) have become cost prohibitive on Ethereum. In the past this was a few cents for each transaction but because of the explosion of decentralised services built on Ethereum, fees have gone up to $60-70 due to the amount of congestion on Ethereum blockchain. To redeem six bottles of MTB21 VCO at $2, the digital asset holder has to pay $50 of gas fees. Mike is pragmatic about this as it is something affecting all projects on the Ethereum block chain, expecting the problem mid-to long term being solved.
In the meantime, Mike wanted people who had supported to project to be able to drink his wine. Therefore, Mike is doing a wine drop. Based on the concept of the Air Drop, whereby digital tokens are given to people to incentivise them to use the tokens. So, Mike has made available MTB17 wine to anyone who has MTB tokens for 2018,19 and 20. The only thing the person has to do to receive a bottle of MTB17 wine is to pay for shipping and handling, with a maximum of 60 bottles free if someone has 60 tokens.
It’s amazing how far Mike has come just in the two years since we last spoke to him but there is much more for him to do at Costaflores. From liquidity mining and yield farming to maximise the return of investment from crypto assets related to the Ethereum blockchain….
Mike’s approach is to test and learn, deploy, trial, experiment and execute many areas of technology that are leading edge. He takes things that for many are conceptual and through his focus on producing wine, makes them happen. Mike wants to not only prove things work, he wants to show a better way and, by sharing his experiences, help others embrace technology in their experience of wine (whether that’s buying, investing, consuming or making).
Mike talks about the journey so far as three phases, linked to the three grape varieties grown at Costaflores.
Phase 1 was Malbec- establishing the platforms for his own wine and vineyard.
Phase 2: Petit Verdot is the ability for others to use the same platforms and assets e.g. OpenVino Exchange.
But there is a phase 3… Cabernet Sauvignon. We can’t wait to hear what technology that will be….
For more information on Mike’s Capstone visit:
OTHER WINE CAPSTONE INSIGHTS
TO READ ABOUT ROBERT EDEN’S WINE CAPSTONE CLICK HERE
TO READ MORE ABOUT THE FUTURE TECHNOLOGY IN WINE CLICK HERE
TO READ MORE ABOUT ENGLISH SPARKLING WINE AND CAUTIONARY WINE CAPSTONES CLICK HERE
TO READ MORE ABOUT THE HOME FOR FINE WINE CAPSTONE 67 PALL MALL CLICK HERE