Can winemaking benefit from blockchain technology? Richard Hemming MW
With the growing ubiquity of blockchain technology, the question isn’t so much what can you put on the blockchain, but why would you want to? In some cases, the answer to that question is straightforward — in others, not so much.
For cryptocurrency, the idea is to own digital money that exists outside the international banking system, and by extension to profit from those currencies as demand for them increases (especially if you are about to become President). The benefits are self-evident, at least in theory.
For real-world assets, blockchain tokenisation is a means of trading physical items. For example, millions of dollars-worth of wine is already represented on the blockchain, being bought and sold by the bottle, case or even barrel. These trades are essentially no different to what wine merchants have been doing for centuries, but the blockchain allows for greater immediacy, transparency and control at the individual level.
But why would anyone want to put the winemaking process on the blockchain? Surely the process of winemaking itself doesn’t benefit from being on a public, immutable ledger. Or does it?
Digitising viticulture
Costaflores in Argentina would argue that it does. In 2018, they started an ambitious project to record all their vineyard and winery activity on the blockchain, making every part of the winemaking process open to public scrutiny. In addition, sensors throughout the vineyard automatically record environmental data and write that to the blockchain as well.
The company’s founder has an admirable motivation: he cites open-source software as his inspiration, allowing anyone to see, share and potentially improve the process — in contrast to winemaking’s traditional code of silence, as he sees it. Several videos on the Costaflores homepage explain his approach in more detail.
Seven years on, the project is still going, with a wealth of comprehensive if sometimes inscrutable documentation on their wiki. It’s an extraordinary resource, explaining exactly what is required to make their wine, as well as some intriguing side quests such as Vinophonics™, a ‘project to build a musical instrument that interprets the data from the vineyard and the blockchain.’
The question remains, however: why put this on the blockchain, specifically? Why not just publish it on social media or blogs?
Blockchain benefits
Authenticity is one reason: the way blockchain works is to record a complete history of everything that is added to it, which can never be erased. That means the Costaflores viticulture data has arguable more trustworthiness than it might have on blogs or social media, which can be deleted or edited. Also, the data can be used in creative ways. One suggestion was to gameify the winemaking process, by allowing people to buy tokens that allow them to vote on winemaking decisions based on the climate data and other factors — this is known as a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation or DAO, to use the web 3.0 parlance. Whether you would want to drink the results of crowdsourced winemaking decisions is another matter.
While it seems easy to argue against the necessity of the blockchain for recording winemaking processes, there is another way of looking at it. Advocates of the technology believe that the blockchain will soon become the standard platform for every online interaction. Just as we take it for granted that emails and websites work thanks to existing internet protocols, blockchain is predicted to become the underlying architecture for everything online.
For now, sharing the minutiae of winemaking on the blockchain might seem to beg the question, why would you? But before too long, that logic might get reversed: because after all, why wouldn’t you?
