The global wine industry has become more competitive than ever. With annual wine production of 36 billion bottles spread across more than a million different wine labels from 150,000 professional winemakers worldwide, making a great wine is not enough anymore.
How, then, does one wine estate differentiate itself from the others? By embracing technology at all stages – from inputs to processing and management, all the way through to marketing and sales.
Technology is everywhere, from vineyard to virtual shopping basket
While nothing will ever replace the human instincts that winemakers with years of experience behind them develop, savvy winemakers are making more and more use of technology to streamline their outputs. Drones are becoming commonplace in the vineyard, for more precise pest control and to gather data. Some wineries are even harnessing the power of the USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to map which varietals to plant where, based on the analysis of heat and wind patterns.
There are wine-processing tools that improve harvesting, sorting, settling and filtration. Alcohol-free wine is a growing market, made possible by vacuum distilling at low temperatures after fermentation, to retain all the flavours while eliminating all but a fraction of the alcohol.
Technology exists that takes historical data on wine-drinking trends to model future patterns, which winemakers can use to plan. There are tools that pull conversations and wine mentions from social media and other channels, providing wineries with real-time feedback from consumers to get a better understanding of how the public is reacting to their wine.
Harvesting big data can tell us, for example, whether younger generations are drinking as much wine as their parents did, which wines people will want to drink in a few years’ time, and which cultivars to plant given the qualities of a winery’s terroir. There is even an app that analyses wine labels to understand what drives consumers to make a purchase.
Distribution is changing forever
Despite the breakneck acceleration to e-commerce brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, the wine sector has been slow to embrace it, lagging the retail world by 5 to 10 years, according to the State of the Wine Industry 2021 Report. This includes the development of websites, the inclusion of shopping carts, the effective use of social media, the most basic use of e-commerce search engine optimisation (SEO) and Google Analytics, and the ability to collect and maintain consumer databases that personalise consumers’ interactions. While this report refers to wineries in the USA, indications are that trends in South Africa are very similar.