By Peg Melnik, The Press Democrat | Get a taste of the future at this Napa winery | August 2024

With a dome of fluorescent lights shining on ever-changing computations displayed in different colors, the 110,000-square-foot cellar at Palmaz Vineyards looks more like the bridge in “Star Trek” than a winemaking facility.

But the complex calculations aren’t tracking travel to distant planets or galaxies. Instead, with the help of AI, they’re fine-tuning the metamorphosis of the grapes in the fermentation tanks below.

Artificial intelligence may not be able to use its senses — like taste or smell — to craft wine, but it’s still doing a good job at the Napa Valley winery.

“People think of this artificial intelligence as sentient beings,” co-vintner and chief operating officer Christian Palmaz said with a laugh. “But it’s not like that.”

Credited by experts as one of the most advanced wineries in the world when it comes to using AI, Palmaz Vinyards has implemented a so-called Fermentation Intelligence Logic Control System, developed by Palmaz, who has a background in computer science.

The system is so sophisticated it has even surprised the vintner and innovator.

In 2017, when the Atlas Fire forced the Palmaz crew to evacuate, the fermentation system kept the process running without human intervention.

“FILCS (the Fermentation Intelligence Logic Control System) did something unusual and unexpected when the cellar team was unable to come to work,” Palmaz said. “It mimicked a cooling behavior that was highly correlated in its data set to a winemaking technique the cellar team does to the fermenter during extended maceration.”

By doing this — on its own initiative — the system kept the wine from oxidizing, saving the winery $10 million in wine that would otherwise have been wasted, according to Palmaz.

“We really got lucky there, because I didn’t design the system to work like this,” he said.

Out in the vineyards, the winery also benefits from an equally impressive AI system, also developed by Palmaz.

Called Vineyard Infrared Growth Optical Recognition (VIGOR), this application collects data from a plane that makes biweekly flyovers. With an infrared camera, the small Cessna aircraft can detect moisture levels. The AI program then uses this data to guide watering and to standardize grape growth.

This system has been very cost-effective, Palmaz said. Since it was implemented eight years ago, it has allowed the winery to decrease water usage by 20% to 30%.

In addition to increasing efficiency and quality across the vineyard and winemaking operations, the AI tools also have helped elevate the “artistic side of winemaking,” Palmaz said.

Developing and implementing these tools has allowed executive winemaker Tina Mitchell and consulting winemaker Mia Klein to focus on and enhance the expression of the wines they produce.

A one-of-a-kind vintner

Palmaz Vineyards was founded in 1997 by Christian Palmaz’s parents, Julio and Amalia Palmaz. It is situated on a spread of 640 acres just northeast of Napa in the Coombsville American Viticultural Area. With 64 acres planted to vines, it produces just under 10,000 cases a year, mostly Bordeaux varietals.

The winemakers make the wine, Christian Palmaz stressed. The AI tools are simply for quality control.

The co-vintner is not aware of other vintners inventing AI systems, the way he is, or other wineries using AI tools to the extent Palmaz Vineyards does. He stays up to date on developments in artificial intelligence, especially in academia, and he encourages other wineries to explore AI so that winemakers can focus on the artistic side of winemaking.

“The Fermentation Intelligence Logic Control System, for example, is able to see extremely subtle trends,” Palmaz said. “They would be impossible for a human to identify usually, until they sense the side effects of the damage.”

The way science and winemaking interplay at Palmaz Vineyards didn’t happen by chance.

Julio Palmaz, a former radiologist, invented the Palmaz Coronary Stent — a balloon expandable stent that revolutionized medicine. It was licensed to Johnson & Johnson in 1992 and artifacts related to his research are now part of the Smithsonian Institution’s medical collection.

“We’re a pretty science-driven family, ” Palmaz said. “My father’s background in medicine and my background in data science, I think, aligned our efforts to surround the (winemaking) process with innovations to observe.”

‘Wineries should embrace AI’

Angelo Camillo, a Sonoma State University associate professor who is working on a research paper on AI, says Palmaz Vineyards is the most advanced winery he has come across in his research.

Like Christian Palmaz, he thinks wineries would benefit from embracing the new technology.

“I believe it’s like when computers took over all industries,” Camillo said. “The question wasn’t if a business needed a computer. The question was how many computers it needed.”

Like computers, AI improves efficiency, quality and consistency, he explained.

“I believe AI may deliver something even more extraordinary than what computers have done over the last decades,” he said. “One thing I know for sure is that we’re at the point of no return. AI is here to stay.”

AI chatbots greeting guests

AI can be useful in the wine industry beyond wine production, Camillo said.

In Europe, for example, AI programs are revolutionizing the wine tourism sector with applications from Divinea, an Italian technology company.

The company’s Wine Suite includes a chatbot that interacts with winery guests before a visit and can create a detailed profile of each guest. The data gleaned can then improve the visit, as well as boost post-visit sales.

Divinea also offers an AI program called Midjourney, an image generator that creates photos from textual descriptions and prompts, much like OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. Camillo said such programs could potentially replace costly photo shoots.

“We’re waiting for a possible AI industry roll out and eventually market saturation,” Camillo said. “The AI market is highly fragmented across industries, and based on my current information, there are no major players in the wine industry.”

‘AI is still in its infancy’

While AI is all over the news these days, many people are still confused when it comes to its actual applications and how best to use it, Camillo said.

When it comes to the wine industry, it can transform the traditional art of winemaking, explains author Reddy Mallidi, who interviewed Camillo for his book “AI Unleashed.”

“At its core, AI empowers data-driven decision-making throughout the winemaking process,” Mallidi wrote.

Encouraging wineries to explore AI opportunities, Camillo said there are no hard and fast rules, especially when it comes to farming grapes.

“It depends on the size of the operation, capacity, operational scalability and, of course, the investment involved,” he said.

Some applications don’t make sense, Camillo said. For example, using drones to target insects on a few vines in a 100-acre vineyard would be too expensive.

“With AI, it’s all about being educated and staying informed,” the associate professor said. “It’s challenging to predict what the industry will look like in the future. The industry is still in its infancy.”

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/lifestyle/ai-wine-industry-napa-valley/?artslide=3

You can reach wine writer Peg Melnik at 707-521-5310 or peg.melnik@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @pegmelnik.