We are currently in what many believe is the most challenging time for the Australian wine industry in the last 25 years.

In the current operational environmental staffing, weather, machinery availability, inflationary and supply side pressures and political factors have all lead to reduced profitability of the sector and they will continue to hurt businesses that do not look to improve operational efficiencies and work smarter.

Incorporating technologies into a business that allow it to accurately and efficiently track, record and disseminate critical business metrics provides stakeholders with key insights as to how improvements can be made within their business.

Through the adoption and implementation of modern technologies, GPS tracking packages, mobile and PC based apps in field efficiencies can be realised, and savings made through accurate and up to date provision of information, improvements made to staff training and staff satisfaction, fatigue to machine operators reduced, safety of staff increased, and the speed and quality at which information flows through and is available to a business and its key stake holders is dramatically improved upon.

Onboard GPS and Auto-steer technologies have been a key driver of major efficiency improvements within the broadacre industry allowing increased profitability to be realised within this sector. Dairy is currently undergoing a similar technological revolution allowing for major efficiencies to be realised.
The Viticulture industry seems to have dragged its feet on a number of these fronts and is only now just starting to adopt similar technologies.

This presentation looks to explore a few of these that will improve operations without major imposts to a business.

Family Fresh Farms grows 5ha of Mini Snack Cucumbers (Qukes®) in two 2.5 hectare glasshouses. We have a team of 85 plus people on any given day & we operate 365 days of the year. We are highly labour intensive so it’s our biggest cost. So ensuring we utilize and maximize our most expensive resource through easy, validated, precise and on-time information or data is imperative. We need to enhance and encourage peak performance at all times plus discourage and minimize any poor or wasteful performance or use of people’s time.
Yes, we have some of the latest and most expensive information technology at work at Family Fresh Farms – namely Priva FS Performance which is a Dutch platform that is focused on labour planning & management. This is connected to desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. This may not be within the reach of every company – but this technology pays its way without exception year on year. We also utilise a useful maintenance app to keep on top of all recurring and current tasks. This is a great tool for auditing purposes as there is a record of servicing and maintenance of all equipment.
However, there are option for smaller businesses like Google Drive, Google Sheets, Trello, Slack, Muddy Boots, DropBox – which can extremely powerful to deliver information on-time, everytime and keep records up to date.
In this session – I am going to demonstrate – what can be done and how powerful & useful the software can be and how it can make you more efficient, profitable and give you the necessary data to make calculated and weighted decisions.

The world of wine is facing challenges like never before.... increasing production costs, climate change, a global pandemic, changing consumer behaviour, labour shortages and digitisation to name just a few.
The need to proactively reinvent ourselves is critical to remain relevant and competitive.
Technology is one of the levers we have to challenge the status-quo but to do this in isolation without putting our people at the heart of this change and challenging the way we work will only get us so far.
Our winery of the future puts data and our teams who use it at the heart of all we do - giving us the ability to make smarter, faster decisions to transform our operations, and ultimately make wine better.
Kate will share successes and learnings from Pernod Ricard Winemakers’ journey of transformation journey so far.

The modern winemaker has many levers they can pull to impact the final quality of their wine.
In the final stages before packaging, one could argue that dissolved gas management is one of the most critical to ensure finished wine quality remains high. The balance of Dissolved Oxygen, Dissolved Carbon Dioxide and Dissolved Nitrogen is fundamental to longevity and customer appreciation.
Luke will discuss the application of a hydrophobic gas transfer membrane to wine prior to packaging utilising control systems to achieve the right dissolved gas specification. Looking at examples at a production scale where degassing and carbonating via membrane can be done efficiently and saving significant time and effort.
Combining the technology of gas transfer membranes with process control automation, it takes the application to a level where it can be incorporated with other operations to deliver fast and accurate adjustment while minimising time effort and financial costs.