Brix and chips: IT in the training and research winery of the Robert Mondavi Institute at UC Davis

The Department of Viticulture and Enology of University of California at Davis has recently been endowed with a new training and research (T&R) winery. The heart of the winery is the fermentation room which houses close to 170 fermentation tanks of various sizes. The high-tech fermentation tanks raise fermentation control to a new level. Each is equipped with digital sensors that were purpose-designed by a team of engineers led by a distinguished inventor and CEO of a semiconductor producing firm who also is a wine enthusiast. The sensors on a chip closely monitor fermentation and wirelessly transmit measurement data, e.g. data on Brix, to the winery's computers and into the cloud. In this paper we briefly introduce the winery and we then illustrate digital fermentation monitoring using monitoring of color and phenols in red wine fermentation as an example. We close our contribution with reflections on the transferability into practical enology of the digital sensors.