During the Symposium of Masters of Wine in Bordeaux last June, the first panel was on “Wine on the Web”. The moderator was Christophe Macra, one of the four French MW. Christophe invited four prestigious panelists to talk about Wine and Web: Jancis Robinson, Rowan Gormley, founder and CEO of NakedWines.com, Eric LeVine, founder and CEO of cellartracker.com, Mike Linton, consultant for Peet’s Coffee and Tea and now on the advisory board of venture capital companies.

I will not bother you with a longer text as the panel was filmed and is now available on the symposium site:

AMOOCON, a VoIP and technical conference that began in 2008, will features 54 talks and workshops by 38 different speakers. AMOOCON is inaugurating a new feature this year: a wine tasting!

Randy convinced author and conference organizer Stefan Wintermeyer to add the idea to this annual event held in Rostock, Germany June 3-5th this year based on the fact that last year he found many speakers and attendees were interested in wine. Because people are coming to the conference from many countries including several from Europe, the United States and Israel, they are each being asked to bring a bottle of their region’s wine if possible. They can also bring cheese if they prefer.

Randy will be speaking there again this year about the VoIP Users Conference and its activities on social networks and in podcasting.  Speakers at AMOOCON  come from different backgrounds resulting in a much more diverse program than a typical technical gathering.

Technology and wine was supposed to be the subject of our Internet live radio show, newwineconsumer.com but since our guests never called in we had to switch to other topics. I feel a little frustrated as I had thought about other things to talk about besides communities, podcasts, etc.

Indeed technology covers also all those industrial processes helping the producer and the consumer to get a better wine in the glass. One of the nightmares of a wine buyer is to wonder in what conditions the wine traveled or had been kept by its successive owners. How many times I decided against buying a bottle in a store (even at a good price) only because I didn’t know the storing conditions of the shop or the way the wine traveled.

All those questions can now be answered, thanks to a special label that reflects a band of temperatures. If a shipment or a place stays within desired parameters, a light flashes green. If temperatures get too high or low, it flashes yellow. The stored date can be downloaded and show when and where the temperature variations occurred. No more risk to have a “cooked” wine! The price of this label is $20 a box for the labeling, a relatively small price for expensive wine.In California, Schug winery already adopted the device made by an Idaho company called PakSense.

Many collectors faced the horrible possibility of fakes: it is such a disgrace (and a sorrow) to buy a fake wine. Unfortunately it is very difficult – even for an experienced collector – to detect a fake.

Fortunately technology is coming to their rescue: Arcane, a nuclear study center in Bordeaux, developed, in partnership with London’s Antique Wine Company, a merchant specializing in older vintages, a process that works by measuring the radiation emitted when a wine bottle is placed under an ion beam. The result measures the age of the bottle and its contents. It is then compared to results from bottles known to be authentic(those stored in the cellars of their producers, for example).

The validity of this technology is already challenged by Russell H. Frye in decanter.com whose company specializes in the identification of counterfeit wine: “It is important that your readers understand that one of the most common techniques for counterfeiting wine is to refill or re-label bottles from the same period as the bottle that they wish to fake. Thus, an analysis of the glass will be of virtually no benefit in those situations. In addition, the database of authentic bottles that is referred to in the article would have to be developed by an independent authority that is not involved in selling these same bottles.”

Let’s the specialists debate between themselves! I’m only interested by the fact that technology is getting more and more available to the wine industry and that the wine industry is ready to use it extensively.