Big Data in a Vineyard

[jdaw1]

A winery might seem like an odd place to find cloud computing and big data tech. But in more than 50 vineyards in California's Napa Valley, sensors are continually gathering data about the health of the vines and relaying it to the cloud for analysis, giving wine makers insight that can lead to higher quality wine.

Fruition Sciences, an Oakland, Calif.-based startup (sometimes called the "vine nerds"), is one of the first companies to bring this tech to the wine industry.

Its solar-powered sensors, which attach directly to the vines, measure how much water is moving through the plant known as its transpiration rate and send this data wirelessly to Fruition's cloud-based server.

From there, customers log into Fruition's web app and get a real-time view of how their vines are doing, including how much water the vine is losing every hour and how weather conditions are affecting it.

"We are constantly assessing information on what’s happening with the vine, and to help the plant to respond to the environment," Thibaut Scholasch, co-founder of Fruition Sciences, told us.

Fruition Sciences' sensors work by applying heat to a section of the vine stem and measuring the temperature before and after to determine how much water is moving through the plant.

"We can precisely measure the heat dissipation along the vine stem while the water is being displaced," Scholasch said. "The level of resolution we get with this data is fantastic."

Being able to see what's happening inside the vine replaces the guesswork that often goes into the decision of whether or not to irrigate. It's often hard to figure how if a vine needs water just from looking at it.

This is especially important in California, where most wineries irrigate their crops.

[Andy Velebil]

A friend of mine is the vineyard manager for a very high end Napa producer. When I was up last month to visit him he showed me how this works. Really cool stuff. He can check current and past data on his cell phone or call the workers to do certain things as needed when he's not actually at the vineyard. And it was really educational to see how it all charts out and how the vines respond to different environmental changes. And people wonder why, even in not so great years, there is still decent wines being made. All this technology certainly has made a huge difference in farming.