Wine has been around for thousands of years, and as everything else around us, it’s getting an upgrade from the digital era. Just five years ago, there were only a few tech companies interested in the wine industry, but recently, the number of these wine technology startups has dramatically increased. A hundred seventy billion dollars of venture capital have flowed into the food sector in the last couple of years, and the wine industry has taken a quite large part of these investments.

Those companies not only deliver wine or sell it online, but they address a variety of needs; from the vineyard to the consumer, involving farming, production, and delivery. Because of the technology infrastructure now available and the positive trend of using of these new technologies associated with wine, this is really becoming of interest to everybody, not only to wine investors. Even crowdsourcing has been applied to investments in the wine industry; if you think about the past, anything related to wine was expensive, and the hardest thing to do was to get financed. Nowadays, it is no longer in that way. There are several platforms accessible not only to investment companies, but also to individual investors, where you can go on and browse different vineyard and wine projects and be able to fund one. With as little as twenty-five hundred dollars, you can become a wine investor and get to actively participate in the wine-tech revolution.

Among the new gTLDs domains, also called generic domain name extensions, which count 1224 new domain extensions available, you can find .wine. That isn’t surprising, as over 6 billion dollars in wine is sold online every single year, and that number is on the rise. Wine brands can reach a digitally savvy audience, taking advantage of the new .wine domain instead of using a more generic .com, .net or .org as in the past. Wine companies can remark their product using a custom domain extension in order to for their brands to stand out. 13,528 companies are already using this feature for their website, even though the .wine domain extension counts only the 0.06% of the new gTLD market share, where .top, .xyz, .loan, .club and .win are the top-ranking extensions (the extensions with the highest number of registered domains).

Wine delivered right to your doorstep

If you want wine tailored specifically to your palate and delivered right to your doorstep, you can find platforms that do exactly this. These platforms determine your wine tastes and send you a curated selection of recommendations matching wine reviews as well as other factors. Sarah Stimpson, founder of Clara, points out how the tech latest solutions can help customers to discover new flavors: “AI-driven wine subscriptions allow customers to receive wine tailored to their taste while exposing them to new wine flavors. We encourage users to expand their tastes and to try a new and more adventurous selection of wines regularly.”

Drones for monitoring wine production

36 years from now, there are going to be two billion more people on the planet. It is estimated that we have to double the world’s food production by 2050. Additionally, half of the farmland between 1960 and 2030 will be gone. In this scenario, drones could play a major role or actually feeding the world in the next 50 years, which particularly applies to wine. 80% of all drones will be used for agriculture and by 2020, all drones will be armed with a GPS on board navigation computer system, HD video recording cameras, high performing propellers, and, most importantly, an infrared camera. That means that top-level images of your vineyard can be seen in real-time, helping to find out any possible disease. Addressed timely it could save thousands of dollars in curing part of your vineyard, and in some cases saving the disease to spread, thus saving the entire vineyard.

The apps that remind you the name of that wine

Can you recall when you had that awesome glass of wine at a restaurant or your friend’s house, asked its name and forgot it as soon as you got home? There are mobile apps around that help you avoiding this. Vivino is one of those: “Vivino is the world’s largest wine app with over 26 million users, which makes it the world’s largest community of wine drinkers!” Simply snap a photo of the wine bottle and the app instantly recognizes it and saves it to your account. These apps also help you to find the best prices for that specific bottle, as well as looking into the reviews left by over million other people that have downloaded the app. They are like Yelp for wine; wine knowledge at your fingertips to help you decide which bottle of wine to purchase.