About half the hands in the room shot skywards and I was surprised.
I was at the License to Steal national wine marketing workshop that took place alongside the Eastern Winery Expo in Syracuse, New York, last month and the topic was artificial intelligence (AI). We had just seen a presentation about the role of AI in the wine business and Donniella Winchell was leading the follow-up discussion.
How many people were already using AI to help them create content for marketing, social media, and other purposes? The answer was a lot and everyone was interested in learning more.
AI and Productivity Gains
Most of America’s wine is produced by a few very large companies but most of America’s wineries are much smaller and can only dream of the sort of division-of-labor efficiencies that Gallo or Constellation enjoy. Smaller wineries with smaller staffs need all the help they can get to do all the jobs that need to be done.
It is still early days in what promises to be an AI revolution of business practices generally, but the License to Steal workshop showed clearly that there is much interest in increasing productivity in wine business with AI help.
Where is AI headed in the wine industry? AI help with first drafts of sales materials and tasting notes is a beginning, but there is potential for much more. If you want to see where artificial intelligence might go in wine, set your GPS for Moldova.
Moldova’s AI Wine Initiative
Moldova is a small country with a big wine industry and a cutting-edge tech sector, too. If you mix the two together, you get the first vintage of AI wines, which were introduced to the world at this year’s ProWein trade show (click on the image above to watch a brief video of the event).
Diana Lazar and her AI wine team used artifical inelligence applications to make decisions from vineyard to cellar to label design for a Feteasca Neagra red wine and a white blend of Feteasca Alba, Feteasca Regala, and Viorica. Robert Joseph led a ProWein seminar where the AI wines were tasted blind alongside similar conventional products from Moldova.
In a sort of “Judgement of Dusseldorf” poll, a majority of the tasters voted for the AI wines, which I don’t necessarily take as evidence that AI programs make better wines than people, but that people using AI advice can make very good wine.
This Changes Everything?
Although some like to think that making wine is as simple as just letting nature take its course, in fact producing fine wine is a complicated problem-solving process. It is not ridiculous to think that AI programs can be useful in identifying key choices and, in some cases, actually making them. The Moldova initiative shows that AI-directed winemaking can produce impressive results.
Although the popular focus today is on general purpose AI programs like ChatGPT, which are still prone to factual errors and “hallucinations,” I suspect the productive future lies in specialized AI programs specifically trained in complex technical areas such engineering, medicine, and precision agriculture.
So what’s the future of AI in winemaking? Too soon to tell. A few years ago blockchain technology was a hot topic and there were predictions that it would be used in all sorts of ways in the wine industry. Blockchain is being used for sure, but not yet to the extreme extent some people foresaw.
Will AI be the same? There sure is a lot of interest, as I saw at License to Steal, and the list of potential uses is broad. AI is another tool and if it is used creatively and responsibly it has great potential to increase productivity throughout the wine production chain. Let’s see what happens now!
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I will be giving a brief video presentation on April 5 for “Market Growth and Strategic Insights: Wine Industry Conference 2024” organized by the Moldova National Wine and Vine Office.