When it comes to making an original wine recipe, Michael Keller, the owner of The Blending Lab Winery in Los Angeles, gives customers a real-world taste of what it’s like to be a winemaker. 

By Shellye Leggett, for Spectrum News | Original Article

“They’re getting hands-on experience of what a winemaker will typically do. Sitting at the table, trying to come up with what their final product is,” Keller said.

Keller said they’ve been helping Angelenos mix up unique wine blends since October 2016 and were surprised to see no one offering them.

“We were able to blend our own wine in Argentina and when we looked around in California, we found that those experiences were very few and far between,” Keller said.

It’s an interesting experience when they ask the customer to join in on the wine-making journey.

Artificial intelligence helps speed up that journey. There’s been plenty of talk about how artificial intelligence can help ease everyday tasks throughout various industries.

“Speeding up innovation. The wine industry is not known for the pace of innovation. It’s something that evolves slowly over the course of a thousand years. In the past 100 years, in the past century, we’ve seen a pickup in what innovation means for wine,” Keller said.

Keller said AI has a future in agriculture and winemaking, and The Blending Lab uses it daily.

“Whether that’s reporting on our business so we stay informed about everything that’s going on, like a larger business might do, to having AI proofread our copy for email blasts and things of that nature,” Keller said.

But The Blending Lab isn’t the only winery using AI.

Palmaz Vineyards in Napa built a tool called FILCS.

“Why not build a system that helps them express the human element that makes the wine so special and so unique year after year,” said Christian Palmaz, with Palmaz Vineyards.

 The goal is to infuse technology into their wine-making.

“FILCS stands for fermentation, intelligent, logic control system. It leverages some unique AI tools, but is relatively very simple and what it does is it monitors fermentation health, so it has sensors in the tank. It measures about three and a half million points of discrete temperature. And then measures the speed of sound between two points in the tank to give us density,” Palmaz said.

That data allows the fermenter to automatically adjust its settings to what’s required at that point in the fermentation process, but Keller said AI is only a tool.

Nature and winemakers remain the masters.

“We don’t have a lot of external resources. We have to wear many hats. We use AI to create many processes that make our lives much easier,” Keller said.

The Blending Lab is mixing up new blends every day of the week.

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What You Need to Know

• The Blending Lab has been mixing up unique blends of wine since October 2016
• Palmaz Vineyards in Napa built a tool called FILCS
• Data allows the fermenter to automatically adjust its settings to what’s required, at that point in time, in the fermentation process

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