Digital Wine
Easiness to connect devices one each other and capability to build circuits ever smaller, brings to birth of Internet of Things. It means to connect differents devices like a clock and a car, a freezer and our e-agenda, a train with our social profile. Invisible waves carried from wi-fi, data network or bluetooth send this informations in a cloud, where they are elaborated and aggregated, and finally they give us informations about our business or our life.
A device like the Google’s Fitbit can aid to keep on control heart beat, pressure, temperature, chilometers we have walked. It don’t substitute a regular cardiologic examination, but it is useful for an amateur athlete to prepare a race.
And, at the finish, it could send a command at thermostat of home to regulate the temperature of environment when we back.
From Smart City …
In 2010 we have learned for the first time the concept of Smart City, that means not only intelligent city, but usable, a place where facilities are open and easy to use, ecologically sustainable, and with low economic impact. Sensors under the street, for example, can be used to count cars crossing it, sending a signal to turn on or off the traffic lights. In London the accesses to the public transport service are checked thanks famous Oyster Card, to aid traffic manager to handle trains and bus. Sensor into skyscraper of New York alerts engineers when they oscillate over critical values. In Italy we can considerate Turin like an example of smart city, with electric bus and monitoring sensors, and the installation of a phone box multiservice in 2012. All this informations are managed by one or more service control rooms, but they can also be verified from the citizens with simple apps on their smartphone, make them more awareness people.
… to Smart Vineyard
That these devices could be used in farming, and in wine growing, it’s only the next step, with some interesting solutions about sensors installations between vines. Thanks these probes, little devices to append to the wires in the vineyard, they can monitor temperature and environment humidity and presence of mold and ground parameters. A sensor like this may be an help in case of sudden variations of weather conditions. Some of techs companies working with IoT in the vineyards are Italians, like iXem Lab, that has already started to experiment the ‘Internet of Wine’ in some vineyards of Angelo Gaja in Piedmont an Tuscany, two of the best wine regions of the world. Other than collect data sensors, the iXem solution make installation of little cams to visual checking what’s happens in the vineyard. The merge of two informations, visive and numeric, can be verified through the smartphone. Sensors and cams are powered from little solars cells and every cam become a network node to connect sensors (until 60 per hectare) installed in the vineyard, decreasing problems of lack of connectivity.
Technology and little winegrowers
A little winegrower has to do jobs that don’t according with his main job, that is make wine; it cannot stay forever inside to the vines. Every time he or she leaves the vineyard, to partecipate at a fair, or a round with the commerciant, she don’t know what happens at her vines. A such kind of technology can instead help her to monitor with attention the state of vines and grapes, and provide important storical series of data that will can be used in the next years, to compare different vintages. This don’t it means leave tech to manage wine production, but conversely help the producer to have a control always greater over her wine and terroir.
(translated from my italian blog Web in Vigna)
