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We sat down with Pedro Ferrer from Baco Group and talked about the benefits of networked wine analysis instruments.
Why did you invest in a WineScan?
Pedro Ferrer: Baco Group is made up of 135-140 cooperatives in different sectors. In these wineries our average annual production is around 190 million kilos. We use
WineScan in different winery areas. In the harvest, we use it for receiving grapes because within quality parameters, we can make a selection and in this way obtain different products to serve different customers. Our task is to test all the deliveries that come to our cooperatives. To do it, we use WineScan.
We receive the grapes, process and treat them and sell all the wine. All the products are sold through Baco. We sell everything. This has allowed us to obtain uniformity in all the work we are doing. We should give all cooperatives the same opportunity, so they can obtain top quality wines. Besides that, we also use quality parameters determined by
WineScan, so we can give a different grape price to each of our partners, based on the quality. In this way, we assign a different value based on these parameters. We have also tested physiochemical parameters which allow us to classify grapes and determine the type of wine we'll make with each batch of grapes.
Why did you put your analysis instrument in a network?
FOSS proposed the use of Mosaic, which is the network software that we can use to connect all our equipment, for each item of equipment. FOSS can perform updates that are automatically generated across all instruments so that, in real-time, all the equipment is working the same way. What we've done is to take a control wine which we've tested in our main laboratory and four other laboratories of our wineries to determine the test parameters.
This wine is the one we use to test that all equipment is working consistently. So when there's an abnormality in an item of equipment, we get in contact with FOSS so that they can test the equipment, and see what the problem is in just a matter of minutes. This equipment is tested exactly like the other equipment and any abnormality found in the equipment is changed via the network, on which all equipment is installed.
I think what the Mosaic network allows us to do is to accumulate big data from very different areas, which in our case allows us to find out more about the grapes, so we can work better with them and our wines. We can set the parameters which, before, could only be set in isolation in each of our wineries, but which we can now set on a large scale.
I know one of the things I said to FOSS was that it's great having equipment that tests very quickly, but I think it has so much more potential. When using
WineScan, one of the concerns we had was the speed of testing of each of the trailers, delivering grapes because it must be taken into account that we now have batches of up to 2 million kilos of grapes in 600, 700 or 800 trailers and 800 tests are done each day. The truth is that this networked WineScan system has given us a very reliable and fast solution.