Talk-A-Vino

There is never a dull moment in the world of wine – and there is not enough time in the day to track all the latest happenings. Here is a collection of recent and most notable wine news and updates.

Mars – wine’s next frontier
Yes, it is Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun. What Mars has to do with wine? If you ask Elon Musk, a lot. A relentless entrepreneur now has his sights on the world of wine, and apparently, he found a way to connect wine with another one of his passions – space. It appears that the 4 years long study conducted at UC Davis demonstrated that grown in space, the grapes had shown great potential for developing unparalleled taste profile while offering a substantial yield per vine, enabling the production of top-level wines at somewhat reasonable prices. Elon Musk teamed up with Paul Hobbs who was a consulting winemaker on the UC Davis project, and now he is building a fully enclosed vineyard set that will be delivered to Mars using a Space XM rocket. The vineyard will be installed and managed by the robotic staff, and the first harvest is expected to take place in 2030. The wine will be fully processed on Mars up to the bottling stage and will be delivered to Earth by the same Space XM rocket. No other details are available at the moment.

Screaming Eagle is going to produce what?
Screaming Eagle, the most iconic of all California wineries is secretly working on a new project, and it is not wine. Starting in 2028, the top 10% of the Screaming Eagle mailing list customers will have an opportunity to purchase the Marijuana extract, dissolved in neutral spirit and packaged into 175 ml bottles. The Marijuana plants are growing right between the Cabernet Sauvignon vines at Screaming Eagle vineyards. The plants are harvested by hand and processed within 3 hours of arrival to the winery, to retain absolute freshness. By growing in such symbiotic conditions with grape vines, marijuana plants acquire unique tasting characteristics and the elixir earned lots of praise from the focus group involved in the testing of this new product. The availability will be extremely limited. The pricing had not been publicly disclosed yet.

Coravin + AI =
Coravin, the utmost innovator and maker of wine tech gadgets teamed up with Google and Nvidia to add AI technology to the new top-tier A+W wine preservation systems. Each A+W device will be equipped with a Nvidia chip and connected to the Google AI cloud. The A+W device will be conducting real-time organoleptic analysis of the wine and the results will be further processed by the AI cloud to be able to assess the aging of the wine and drinking habits of the Coravin customers. All collected data will be also shared with the producers. It is expected that the next model of A+W will be able to detect non-ideal serving conditions of the wine and heat, cool, or filter the wine as needed for the optimum taste while the wine is being poured. Coravin’s chief scientist also predicts that at some point the Coravin devices will become smart enough to talk to each other and share their owner’s stories.

Amazon wine
Amazon finally decided to join the wine fray and start producing its own wines. Well, it is too early to talk about Amazon vineyards – for now, Amazon teamed up with Washington’s hallmark producer, Chateau St. Michelle to produce wine under Amazon labels. Amazon decided to use creative names for their wines, so the inaugural release will see “Mine is Better” Merlot, “Mine is Bigger” Cabernet Sauvignon, “Bottoms Up” Chardonnay, and “Sugar Rush” dessert wine.
Also taking the wine story even further, all the wine mentions in the Kindle books will become clickable in the text and readers will be able to order wines mentioned in the books with one click directly from their Kindle device. Inadvertent orders might be a concern here, so 007 readers, beware – Bollinger Champagne recently increased in price…

Wine G to Z
A concern about Gen Z not being interested in wine had been widely circulated throughout wine industry publications. E & J Gallo Winery, the biggest wine producer in the US, decided not to leave the wine story of Gen Z to a chance. E&J Gallo developed a special application called WineGZ to allow Gen Zs to fully customize their wine experience. As project director, Lotta Drinkin, explained “Gen Zs of the verified drinking age based on their country of residence will be able to fully customize their wine experience by selecting grapes, type, material and shape of the bottles, and many other characteristics to their exact liking”. For example, the grapes can be chosen strictly based on the carbon footprint of the vineyards, the ESG rating of the country of origin, and the social score of the winemaker. There is a choice of material for the bottle from glass to plastic to cardboard to metal to clay, and the shape of the bottle can be round, rectangular, or even “upload your own design” shapes. Based on the initial raving feedback, this project is expected to revolutionize the relationship between Gen Zs and the wine industry.

That’s all I have for you for today, but more news is coming. Cheers to the wine news and updates!