In order to contribute to building a smart wine industry, the company has finalized its first industrial pilot series in seven wine cellars throughout Chile and Argentina with major progress.
As part of its Smart Wine Industry Strategic Program, in 2020 Viña Concha y Toro’s Center for Research and Innovation (CRI) launched a new Harvest Pilot Plan to optimize, boost the efficiency of and digitalize processes related to the harvest. The first series of pilot tests were recently completed, which enabled us to assess the implementation of the Smart-Winery (SW) digital platform.
“This plan included a series of pilot tests in several of the company’s wine cellars, in which we tested SW, a unique platform that interacts with an integrates other technological tools used by the company to optimize winemaking processes, increase the efficiency of wine cellars’ production capacities, and digitalize harvest and winemaking processes”, explained CRI Engineering R&D&I Leader, José Cuevas.
The benefits of this Harvest Pilot Plan for the company and the wine industry include the capacity to forecast grape and wine quality, maximize potential grape quality, digitalize processes and integrate systems, among others.
“These major advances that we have demonstrated in precision viticulture would not have been possible without the collaboration of the entire team of CRI researchers, together with members of Viña Concha y Toro’s Winemaking Department and Information Technology Department”, added José Cuevas.
Along the same lines, and continuing toward its objective of contributing to the development of a smart wine industry, other types of technologies were also involved in this first stage of industrial pilot tests, such as the implementation and testing of a new Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure prototype, which included new density sensors developed by two multinational companies (Winegrid and Parsec), as well as the integration of various technologies that have already been installed in the company’s wine cellars (from providers such as TankNET, VinWizard and Kreyer).
In 2022, a new series of pilot tests will be carried out to extend the implementation of Smart-Winery and complementary technologies to more fermentation processes and wine cellars.
