[andtheboat]

"People are part of terroir"

The most common type of machine automation in the wine industry is the use of optical sorters - no longer do you need rows of people separating good grapes from raisains and debris. The machine scans what's going through the shoot and uses multiple prongs to flick anything unwanted into a separate container. The sorters are even transportable to different wineries and vineyards.

The issue is that wine is not an engineering product, people don't want it all to taste the same. These machines do have calibration but in my experience we're getting too close to wine as a generic product. That is my fear with something like this - we know more than ever about grapes and when to harvest, we lose what makes a wine unique.

So while I praise this product and the exciting world of agricultural technology - just not sure it's the right direction for wine.