Page 12 - Grapevine July-Aug 2020

In The Winery

the moment in the tank, they are free from tasks
that normally require manual testing and can con-
centrate on tasting and other creative aspects of
producing great wine.

“Winemaking is a biologically controlled reaction,
plus things we can’t put numbers to,” Palmaz said.
“These things are what you can see, smell, taste
and feel. It’s the art. I designed Felix to free wine-
makers from distractions so they could add that
human touch and enhance their artistic influence.
If the winemaker wants a more extracted aroma,
or a more extracted color, for example, they
can tell Felix how to manage it. If they catch the
moment when a beautiful aromatic shows up, they
can put Felix on hold and preserve that moment.
It’s all about time and efficiency and a little bit of
quality control.”

Felix is only one component of the Palmaz fam-
ily’s merger of tradition and technology to make
great wine. Christian Palmaz, with his strong back-
ground in computer science, also designed VIGOR
(Vineyard Infrared Growth Optical Recognition)
to monitor and adjust conditions in the vineyard.
Twice a week, aircraft fly over the vineyards and
take infrared images that illustrate vine health by
measuring chlorophyll in the plants. That data,
along with ground data collected manually, helps
determine how much irrigation each plant requires.

“The objective,” Palmaz said, “is to make adjust-
ments so that all of the vines are ripening even-
ly. I had a college professor who said, ‘Low tech
farming is farming the group so that all the vines
behave like an individual. High tech farming is
farming the individual to behave as a group.’ That’s
what we’re doing. It’s the future of farming.” For
Palmaz Vineyards, VIGOR has paid off: in its first
year, Palmaz experienced a nearly 20% reduction in
water usage per acre.

In addition to Felix and VIGOR, Palmaz has incor-
porated Veeam Backup Essentials software into the
system as tools for data backup and recovery. With
data-driven decision making, Palmaz generates
multi-petabytes (one petabyte equals one million
gigabytes) of information. “Data was burying us,”
he told The Grapevine Magazine. “Data was get-

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