In recent years, a number of prestigious Bordeaux vineyards have embraced digitalisation, with the aim of more effectively controlling their production quality. Actemium Bordeaux Process is supporting them in this initiative.
Winemaking is a world we can readily imagine as set in its traditions, jealous of its secrets and closed off to industrial or digital approaches. But some major Bordeaux vineyards are opening up their cellars to digital solutions imported directly from the factory of the future. In 2021, a pioneer in this digital approach, a prestigious winery in the Entre‑Deux‑Mers region, invested in four large autonomous mobile robots to operate the conveyor system transferring the grapes to its vats (See “Robots introduced to wine cellars”).
Nearly four years on, these laser-guided machines continue to shuttle between the grape delivery point and the cellar, moving up to 10 tonnes of grapes an hour. Together with the productivity gains come health and safety benefits for the workers: less load carrying means a reduced risk of accidents and musculoskeletal problems.
Stéphane Angevin, Automation and Industrial ICT Project Manager at Actemium Bordeaux Process, explains: “This initiative, undoubtedly a world first, has sparked interest from other major winemakers interested in automation solutions and processes, with options and use cases that vary according to each vineyard and each cellar master’s receptiveness. In this sector, perhaps more than any other, we have to offer custom solutions tailored not only to objective parameters, but also to a deep-seated cultural sensibility.”
Automated temperature regulation
Robots, IoT, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, human-machine interfaces, touchscreens, sensors and probes are gradually – and often discreetly – finding their way into the cellars and vats of the most prestigious Bordeaux wineries.
Winemakers are particularly keen on applications to regulate temperatures in their vats at each stage of the fermentation process. Since time immemorial, checking the must density has required manual sampling, which is time-consuming and painstaking work. Some pioneering cellar masters quickly grasped the benefits of applying connectivity solutions from industrial settings such as vehicle manufacture and aviation to help monitor and improve their juice quality.
Thousands of data points upload to the cloud where they can be viewed by the winemaker.
A business in the Saint‑Julien appellation has installed connected probes to autonomously manage density in its 80 fermentation vats. From their programming console, the cellar manager can monitor temperature conditions in real time, precisely monitor the fermentation process – tracking alcohol content (ABV) and sugars (degrees Brix) – and respond to any unwanted variations.
In the event of overly slow or stuck (stalled) fermentation, for example, an SMS, email or popup alert is immediately sent to the manager, enabling businesses to avoid quality-related losses, which in the case of stuck fermentation can be 10% of the value of the product in the vat.
Global traceability solution
The temperature management application lends itself to a range of add-ons. Actemium Bordeaux Process joined forces with Onafis, a Nantes startup specialising in the wine industry, to install a global traceability solution based on automating the entire production process, from mapping out the grape harvest through to bottling.
With global traceability, everything can be identified, measured and analysed: volumes, weights, destemming losses, microbiological risks, which vats grapes from particular plots end up in, yield from each square metre of vines, etc. Because all the sensors are linked via the universal IO‑Link protocol, diagnostics can be generated remotely, and any corrective or preventive actions scheduled as soon as possible.
For a winery with around 150 vats and a good hundred foudres (giant barrels for maturing wines), this amounts to between 15,000 and 20,000 data points uploaded to the cloud where they can be viewed by the winemaker.
“This mine of information offers unprecedented insights into production management and optimisation,” says Stéphane Angevin. For example, vat covers can be opened according to the grapes’ origin, and the compositional origin of each vat can also be adjusted. “In fact, the cellar manager can significantly improve productivity and refine the quality implications of every operation.”
03/13/2025
