Winely Work: New ideas fermenting

New Zealand startup Winely has developed a data-intelligence platform that allows winemakers to monitor and manage the fermentation status of their batches continuously. The company uses proprietary sensors, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and cloud-based software to picture the fermentation process in real-time accurately.

According to Chief Executive and founder Jacob Manning, while the winemaking process has traditionally relied on the manual sampling of fermentation tanks, Winely uses IoT (internet of things) connected sensors and data analytics to deliver a data-driven approach fuelled by thousands of data points a day.

The concept was sparked while Jacob was conducting biological research and started talking to fellow founder and now Winely Chief Technology Officer Abbe Hyde about the fermentation process. “Jacob had this fantastic idea of understanding these systems and what’s going on at a molecular level,” Abbe explains.

“I’ve now talked to over 100 winemakers across the world about their practices, and what I found is that winemakers were really struggling in their day-to-day just keeping their fermentations on track and just collecting the basic data points that they needed to make some decisions. So we thought, if we’re going to understand things at a molecular level, we need to start with the basics and give people what they need today to help them out.”

The team started working with a custom crush facility in Central Otago for the 2018 vintage and has since rapidly evolved the technology and grown its customer base. With nothing suitable to purchase off-the-shelf, they develop sensors capable of capturing the data points needed during fermentation, which are placed inside tanks to monitor the process constantly.

Jacob explains that while changes happened rapidly to wine in the primary fermentation stage, previously the only way to get more data was to have more people walking around the tanks taking samples. “One of the main things is they are interested in not having to go to the tanks regularly to take samples. That’s a big health driver – they want to get people off the catwalks because they can be dangerous,” he says. “But now, they won’t have to do the manual tasks, and we provide them with the data collection as well as the deep power stuff – the process decision-making information that can really help them, which is the part that gets me excited.”

The visualisation dashboard allows a winemaker to compare wine fermentation performance to set parameters and targets, with notifications if anything goes outside range. In June, the company announced the latest iteration of the system, which will be applied to both new and existing Winely sensors.

With this new release, Winely customers gain improved sensor accuracy for measuring Brix/Baumé, along with enhanced analysis and real-time visualisation, better sensor reliability, and the ability to monitor large red fermenters autonomously. This version will be available for Winely’s pilot customers in California from August, while pre-orders are currently being accepted from Southern Hemisphere customers for the 2023 vintage.

Since its inception, the company has expanded rapidly, deploying technology across the major wine regions in New Zealand, Australia, and California. However, Jacob explains that beyond playing a vital role in improving the overall quality of wine, the technology also has vast applications across other sectors. “For humanity, this is incredible - no one’s managed to amass this volume of data to understand a biological process before in history… So that allows us to unlock super deep insights into understanding yeast vitality and fermentation kinetics,” Jacob says.

“And so this will probably change the world, we know that there are other industries and areas that are interested in utilising this, what we’ve learned today, as well as the technology product. So what will happen there will be very, very exciting.”