Foodtech: what Winetech can learn from it?
Adding the suffix ‘tech’ to other words doesn’t made more cleare what we are talking about. Winetech, Foodtech, Whatelsetech, we have to identify the topic. So, it cames in help this paper by DigitalFoodLab, a French consulting company to ‘…build the future of food’, where Matthieu Vincent and Jérémie Prouteau, the founders, explain the six point serving to define the Foodtech universe. This points are:
Food Science: the startups developing new food or techniques to produce it
AgTech: startups disrupting agriculture, using drones, AI, sensors and Internet of Things
Consumer Tech: startups helping consumers to cook and to choose food
Supply Chain: startups introducing new solutions for company producing and selling food
Delivery: startups developing new system to deliver food, optimizing time to customer and managing all exceptions
Foodservice: startups reinventing the hospitality industry, improving the management system also using robotics and cloud kitchens.
The link is here above, their report is really interesting. But the question is why Winetech hasn’t a good publications like this. Yes, all people eat, not all Mankind drink wine, may be the answer is right this. Food companies invest in technology really big money respect to wineries: I haven’t exactly figures, it’s my thought, if I find some report I’ll post in this newsletter. In 2017 I found a Winetech in a Crunchbase page, then I updated it in this newsletter in 2022. It’s actually hard to find information about companies or startups in the Wine Tech. Why, in your opinion? Tell me in the comments.
So, if we try to develop this six point for wine, we have Wine Science, VineTech, Consumer Tech, Supply Chain, Delivery, WineService. Well, who operates in the WineTech sector should develop every point and verifiy its placement into one of this six topics and their subtopics, as Wine Tourism as sub of WineService, or tasting notes as sub of Consumer Tech.
Smashing Champagne
There is the bottle, tied with a ribbon, dangling in midair, then the godmother arrives and with a flick of the scissors zac! She sever the ribbon and the bottle flies to the ship where it breaks, at least one hopes. But where does this tradition go back to? So, in Roman times they usually made animal sacrifices to inaugurate a ship, and with blood they marked the wood, which was thus protected, according to them, from misfortunes and tragedies. This was not true of course, but it was still a good omen, except for the sacrificed animals of course. The custom continued for several centuries, until in the Middle Ages the church also took over this ceremony, with a priest or better yet a bishop blessing the boat and baptizing it. There had been a shift from animal blood to holy water, complete with a religious ceremony, but the sailors were probably not so happy with the results.
It was in the 17th century that red wine began to be used, ceremonies were held on the deck of the ship where all participants drank wine from a huge crystal chalice placed in the middle of the deck, and at the end the chalice was thrown into the water.
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It was realized after a while, however, that this way was quite expensive, the chalices cost money, and the shipowner did not always want to spend a lot of money on an object that would later be thrown overboard, so much so that the chalices were often salvaged for later ceremonies.
It was, however, in the 18th century that people began to use a bottle to break on the ship's keel, first of red wine, then of Madeira and finally of Champagne, the only bubbles of the time, much to the satisfaction of course of the producers, while in the United States during Prohibition seawater or apple cider was used.
The use of Champagne to christen a ship was first recorded in 1890 in the United States when the 16-year-old niece of the Secretary of the Navy was named for the launching of the USS Maine. In 1891 Queen Victory christened the HMS Royal Arthur with Champagne in Portsmouth, England, and for the first time an electrical device was used; the queen pressed a button and thus disconnected the current to the vice that held the bottle, which flew by breaking against the side of the ship.
Obviously if a bottle does not break it is not a good sign, bad luck in short. It seems that the bottle that served to inaugurate the Titanic (1912, North Atlantic Ocean) also remained intact, as did that of the Costa Concordia (2012, Italy), but as we know the bottle was to blame but in another sense.
In 2007, the then Duchess of Cornwall, the current Queen Consort Camilla, also christened the passenger ship Queen Victory, but the bottle did not break and during the maiden voyage the passengers suffered from stomach pains and vomiting, so much so that the intestinal virus that affected them was called Camilla's curse.
The godmothers have also changed, initially being the wife or daughter of the owner or designer, while today women and girls from the star system are invited, usually from Hollywood, actresses, singers, famous movie or television personalities. With the evolution we will soon see some Instagram or Tic Tok influencers breaking bottles on ships.
A little hope for Australian export to China
In 2020 China rose the import tariffs from Australia until 200%; there was an affair of foreign politics between Canberra and Beijing. They were more than $20 billion worth of sanctions on exports, and Australian wine was one of the goods subjects to rise of tariffs. Now, maybe, there’s a little hope, because China has agreed to lift those one about Australian barley and this get a good feeling also for winegrowers. Australia used to export 39 percent of its wine product to China alone; in the previous four months, exports rose to 50 percent. Suffering most from the tariff increase were mainly small bulk wine producers, who base 70 percent of their budget on exports to China. Until november 2020 China was the buyer where Australian wine is sold at the highest price, $6.86/liter; this compares with $2.28 in the U.S. and Japan or $1.18 in the U.K.
Climate change hits Champagne
All of us know how Champagne tastes, the difference from Blanc de Blanc and Blanc de Noir. But smell and taste could soon change cause climate change. The Champagne region has a great risk to suffer to drought in 15 yrs, and this can change forever our preferred bubble wine. The 325 millions of bottle sold in 2022 was shipped to US, UK and Japan, and some experts say that it doesn’t taste like 10 years ago. The one solution for French Champagne’s winegrowers is to adapt their way to cultivate vines and produce wine to new climate conditions. How can they do it? This is the real challenge, not only for winegrowers but for farmers and breeders as well, and for all of us, in Europe and in the rest of world. If we compare the famine times expecting many people in some place of the Earth, the change of taste of Champagne doesn’t seem so bad.