Poly-Natural: Cutting plastic waste under the vines
When you think about the sheer numbers of plastic ‘bread bag’ clips, metal twisty ties and cane clips littering vineyards, it is a worrying thought.
Ten years ago each of these components may have seemed like distant technology, but it’s increasingly business as usual at Indevin, where cloud capabilities have “revolutionised” the management of harvest in recent years, including through a “democratised” platform that enables winery and viticulture crews to see logistics in real time on mobile devices. “This gives us the agility we need to act quickly and get the most from every hour of harvest,” says Indevin Group Winemaker Jason Cook.
The system was launched for the 2022 vintage, when New Zealand picked a record-breaking crop, with Indevin accounting for 20% of the 532,000-tonne total. Its recent purchase of Villa Maria added complication to that already pressured period, but also the opportunity to lean into new technological solutions, says Indevin’s chief technology officer Peter Terpstra. The biggest lever they could pull was to harvest effectively, “and try to harvest as much of the supply in the right condition at the right time”, he says. “To do that we need all that harvest logistics of the harvester, the trucking companies and the wineries to be working in tune. And of course they are at different cadences.”
Indevin worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on collecting, corralling and aggregating the data, then presenting it real time on digital dashboards, so that winery and vineyard teams were singing from the same song sheet when tracking progress from vineyards, harvesters, trucks and processing. As well as displaying data from Indevin’s 1,004 subblocks nationwide, the system taps into real-time data from sensors on the likes of wine presses, loading bins, pumps and flow meters, enabling Indevin to improve its throughput by 30%, thanks to an alignment of harvest output, grape processing and storage capabilities; through helping manage adverse weather conditions and production issues; and through optimising ground teams. It was, says Jason, “one of the critical parts of surviving that harvest”.
For Group Technical Viticulturist Rhys Hall, the technology supplies “a single source of truth”, so he can easily assess which blocks are planted in Pinot Noir, for example, what the demand is for table, rosé, or sparkling wine, and how that meets the expected supply for each wine style. His colleagues can go to the same system and see harvest expectations against actual yields, winery capacity at that moment, or when each block is to be pruned, and how. As plans are changed, people see revised expectations in real time, without Rhys having to open an array of Excel spreadsheets. The technology helps the team “handle the complexity” of Indevin’s scale, and be “intentional” about what they are growing, which is “something I am huge on”, Rhys says. “These dashboards and tools help me do that and get information out to the teams, so they can grow the wines we are wanting.”
The democratisation of data companywide also means that insights that might once have been siloed in the vineyard are now available to a commercial team, and vice versa. Alongside the AWS system, Indevin uses a companion system called VineCraft, designed inhouse, which offers a map view of 250 vineyards around New Zealand. Indevin can use the visual system to adapt plans, such as the sequence of harvest or pruning order, using a Gantt chart, with changes apparent to anyone accessing the system. “This tool has saved heaps of heartache,” Rhys says.
By next season Indevin plans to have at least five harvesters weighing fruit as it’s picked, giving Rhys a bespoke view of vine performance, able to address underperforming areas where possible. “In the end productivity is the main driver... Being able to track that as it comes off the vine is huge,” he says. “It’s the missing data we didn’t have before, and that technology is increasing rapidly.”
Research & Innovation Forum
Indevin’s data project is one of the presentations at the inaugural Research and Innovation Forum being held in Wellington on 30 August as part of the Altogether Unique 2024 programme. Indevin Group winemaker Jason Cook will talk about utilising real time data and “smart systems” to boost efficiency and wine quality. Attendees will also hear from Nuffield scholar Hans Loder from Penley Estate in Coonawarra, South Australia, whose viticulture programme taps into technology and data to grow efficiency, improve soil health, and better assess fruit ripeness.
