Wines & Drones
Spain is the third largest producer of wine, and the nation has the largest spanning area for production, encompassing over 2.9 million acres planted. The country itself also has over 400 varieties of planted grapes, but approximately 80 percent of their wine comes from only 20 types of grapes.
These wine yards have been tended manually for many, many years, and is often referenced as one of the popular traditional winemaking techniques. However, there has recently been new revelations in the winemaking industry. Mainly in countries like the United States and Australia, wineries have been adapting more advanced technologies, involving drones and robots. This technology is mainly data driven, using analytics to learn more about growing conditions and predictions in grape production. This information uses drones to find areas of stress in plants, which may cause a poor crop yield. Thus, this would allow growers to achieve high quality grapes and an overall yield in product.
It has shown that 10 percent of the wineries have begun using these advanced technologies, and many more are starting to test it out. This can be correlated to the cascade for spread of information technology, as mentioned in class. Wineries are likely closely influenced by its neighbors, because they have same growing conditions; this can be seen an “edge” between them, thus one can create a network of wineries. So this brings into the question of whether or not to switch to new modern technological approaches or stay with traditional winemaking techniques. Initially, there must be a couple of starters who have already adopted the technology (perhaps from hearing benefits from wineries abroad). The decision to switch depends on the relative number of neighbors pursing the new technologies, and the relation of the payoff values for each, which could be the overall amount of wine produced per year. A large group of wineries would not switch to the new methods if there are not a lot of neighbors adopting the technology. On the other hand, if a majority of a certain wineries neighbors are pursing the switch, one might begin to look into the topic too. It is very unlikely that this will cause a complete cascade of adoption of these new technologies. Additionally since biological factors are often hard to modernize, it is very unlikely that one wine yard would be 100% technology based, and would still have some backbone of the old methodologies.