Field Notes

Field Notes

What we are tracking in wine and agricultural technology, and how we read it.

Wine is one of the oldest industries on earth, and one of the quietest about how much it has changed. We started TerraVine to follow that change properly: the data now read from a vine before it is picked, the machines in the cellar, the fight over what goes on the label, and the new regions rewriting a map everyone assumed was fixed. These are our working notes. They are opinionated by design. We would rather be useful than neutral.

Technology

The wine journey in four acts, from the soil to the future of the vine, and the tools changing each one.

Read the notes Regions

Three worlds of wine, each using the same technology for a completely different reason.

Read the notes Companies

Who is actually building this. Our running list of the firms that matter, and why.

Read the notes
What surprised us

Five things we did not expect.

  • The greenest decision a winery makes is usually about the bottle, not the vineyard.
  • The most inventive viticulture on earth is in the tropics, and its core technology is the calendar.
  • China built a modern wine region from desert in twenty years, the way it built electric cars.
  • An AI already recommends wine better than the average shop assistant. The winemaker's judgement is still safe.
  • Removing alcohol from wine is a problem chemistry has not actually solved.
By the numbers

The headline figures we keep coming back to.

208m hLthe lowest global wine consumption since 1957.
0 to 40,000 haChina's Ningxia, from desert to a wine region in twenty years.
~51%share of a typical wine's carbon footprint that comes from packaging and shipping, not farming.
~20%bottles in circulation that may be counterfeit.

Figures from OIV, trade and academic sources; directional, and cited in our factbase.

In the open

We are building this in the open.

If you work in wine, technology, or the place they meet, we would like to hear from you.