From cultivation to production, distribution and marketing, data strategies and the incorporation of technology are revolutionizing the wine industry throughout the value chain.

The adoption of digitalization in the wine sector is still at a low level of maturity, but with a high potential growth rate. The industry is already beginning to understand how a digital transformation disrupts the business throughout the entire chain: it improves efficiency, productivity, sustainability and provides more transparency to consumers, creating disruptive value propositions and new business models.

An important challenge in this sense is to adopt digital transformation in small and medium-sized wine production companies, taking into account two factors: on the one hand, Spain is the third world producer behind Italy and France, with an average production in recent years of 41 million hectoliters, according to data from the Spanish Wine Market Observatory (OeMv). On the other hand, it is important to highlight that the Spain Digital 2025 plan is key to reducing the digital divide between small and medium-sized companies. Currently the Spanish companies that use Artificial Intelligence and Big Data are less than 15%, however, the Digital Spain 2025 Agenda sets the goal of doubling this percentage in five years. 

Digitization brings great benefits throughout the different stages of the wine value chain. These include, for example, better data collection at source (acidity, quality, weight, etc.) with the aim of improving vineyard productivity and yield, product traceability, more efficient use of data to increase productivity and improvements that lead to the introduction of new distribution and marketing methods.  

Artificial intelligence makes it possible to automate and specify tasks that humans carry out today, such as better crop management and control of quality processes in the winery. Likewise, the exploitation of data using these contributes to the reduction of supply costs since it allows the implementation of intelligent storage. 

Going a little further, there are already large wine companies that exploit the data extracted from satellite images and GPS in the vineyard. Using drones and satellites, wineries can easily collect data on ripeness, water scarcity, and disease pressure in the vineyard, and act more quickly to preserve quality. 

Different types of remote imaging technology also make it possible to map the structure of a vineyard. This enables wineries to create 3D maps of the vineyards, which helps with robot technology. on site and the reduction of accidents. The robots use all this information for fertilization and harvesting and inventory control and movement in the warehouse. 

It is interesting to see how -for example- the Internet of Things revolutionizes the industry. Technological sensors placed both in the vineyard, as well as in the winery and the distribution chain, collect data that can be useful information for both the company and consumers, generating added value.

In these scenarios, consumers can use their smartphone to access QR codes with relevant information on the bottles. A blockchain combination with these codes allows a bottle to “become intelligent” and track temperature, humidity, location, who it was sold to, and the current price. Both the producer and the end user could obtain precise information regarding the traceability of the wine, about the vineyard from which it was obtained, how it was grown and elaborated, the additives and the wine reviews from both experts and other consumers. 

The impact of data strategies in the wine industry has enormous room for growth. The most interesting thing is that all kinds of companies in the industry can not only achieve better yields in crops, storage and distribution, but open up an even broader universe of possibilities to create even more attractive value propositions. 

Julio César Blanco – July 15, 2022