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Winemaking is anything but new. Some of the traditions that are more than thousands of years old are still being used today even by the biggest names in winemaking. However, this doesn’t mean that new technologies can’t help and bring some new ideas to the table.

Chateu Clerc Milon, from the famous Bordeaux region of France, is one of the wineries that implement technology and AI to their operations. The vineyard robot, Ted, even though is not capable of doing everything by itself in the winemaking process, does some of the repetitive work such as weeding and soil cultivating, while constantly collecting data.

Napa Valley of California is not lagging behind of the brand new technologies that are being used in France. Palmaz Vineyards uses a software called FILICS, which uses sensors, x-ray and probes to detect problems in order to achieve the most ideal conditions for fermentation and storage.

Another new-world wine firm that uses the wonders of AI to contribute wine-making process is a tech firm from Australia, Alilytich. Alilytich’s significant points are to ensure that there won’t be contamination and managing the inventory.

There are also apps that use AI and big data in the wine world that target the end users. Vivino, an app downloaded by as many as 51 million(which also managed to acquire myself as an active user) helps people all over the world to find the right wine for them. It is more than easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of selection and brands in today’s wine aisles. Vivino tries to tackle this problem by not only asking its users taste preferences such as dryness and acidity but also, it provides the crowdsourced data  when the label of the wine is photographed. In an app which is downloaded by 20,000 users every day, the comments and reviews about the wine one considers buying will probably not fall short. Furthermore, its AI can provide the individual users a “match score” for  the wine they are checking, which is a simple score of the algorithm’s prediction about whether the user will enjoy the wine.

Even though the wine industry has not been the fastest changing industry for the past 2000 years, I believe the recent developments are changing this thousands of years old industry for good and faster than ever.

Old world, new tech: how the wine industry is taking on AI

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2021/05/07/vivino-choose-your-next-great-wine-with-big-data-and-artificial-intelligence/?sh=677360346b94

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In May 2010, 1 Trillion dollars of American companies’ value  wiped within 5 minutes. S&P500 index was down 6% without an apparent reason. Authorities couldn’t find the cause for a very long time. 5 years later, they have found out that it was caused by an individual trader from the North London trading from his bedroom, named Navinder Sarao. He did not use expensive algorithms as the Wall Street does. What he did was to give millions of sell orders for an already falling market and through canceling them before they actually happen, causing the market to fall with a speed that has never seen before. Mr.Sarao manipulated the markets intentionally, which is not allowed under the US laws. The motivation of him was rooted to the high-frequency trading of Wall Street, which is basically using computers to trade very frequently and make tiny profits out of massive numbers of transactions. When Mr.Sarao was sick of losing money to the computers of Wall St., he decided to beat them, through an algorithm of his own. Through his bedroom in his parents’ house, he managed to beat the biggest players of the world’s second largest market, causing a sudden crash, which took its place as the “Flash Crash” in history books.

            After this incident, Navinder Sarao became a rebellious figure popular among the individual traders, who have been trading in a market in which individual investor almost never has such an influence.  

            Fast forward to 2021, Gamestop, a brick and mortar video game seller, had already been losing value, due to the consumers choosing to shop online more and more every day. The excessive amount of short calls by the hedge fund managers drive the stock price to a point of which was considered to be too low by some Reddit users, and a Youtuber called “Roaring Kitty”. The subreddit r/wallstreetbets community believed that they could trigger a short squeeze, an unusual condition that triggers rapidly rising prices of a stock(against the bets of short sellers), since there were significant amount of short orders. The movement gained a massive interest in a very small timeframe, and achieved 73 million pageviews within less than a day.

The motivation of the buyers of Gamestop(GME) varied. Some thought the stock was undervalued, some were just riding the wave, and for some it was more of a message to the Wall St. rather than the money. As a result, on March 10,GME shares closed at $246.90, a whopping 2000% of what it was 3 months before. The movement caused some short-seller hedge funds to lose as much as $4 Billion. Even though the exact numbers were not announced, there are clearly losers of this battle.

In the constantly changing environment of trading, can Wall Street keep its supremacy by adapting technologies and laws faster than individuals, or will we see more Roaring Kitties and Navinder Saraos using algorithms that they develop in their bedrooms and public forums to change the industry dynamics?

Related readings and videos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze