Innovating Wine Through Data

Big Data Beard | By Erin K. Banks | LISTEN HERE

In this episode we met with Christian Palmaz, CEO of Palmaz Vineyards and President and CEO of Vactronix Scientific, a material science company based in Silicon Valley. Palmaz Vineyards has been able to pull together wine and data together to not make better wine but how can big data make the process less prone to error, more sustainable to quality and to allow the wine makers to focus on what is most important, making the best wine possible… to enhance the human element which makes wine beautiful, multi-dimensional, and complex. All the things we have a hard time putting numbers to

In the wine industry, there are many creative people, true artist but as Christian stated, “you can spend your whole life studying art but that does not mean you are going to be a great artist”. Christian now feels like he plays a supporting role to those that have the artistic direction even though he has a computer science background. His father started this innovative spirit and the process of using innovation to problem solve. Christian said it best when talking about his role in wine and data analytics, guys like him “don’t wield the paint brush, we make the paint”… and what great paint it is.

Christian introduced us to their home grown applications, FILCS (Fermentation Intelligent Logic Control System) and VIGOR (Vineyards Infrared Growth Optical Recognition) systems assist in identifying otherwise impossible to see patterns and correlation. These applications were designed to allow the wine maker to spend their time with the only instrument that matters the most, a wine glass. We talk about the data model and what data is used