When most people think of vineyards, thoughts of a lazy, sunny afternoon enjoying select wines tend to come to mind. For the owner and operators, however, the vineyard is but the first step in the production of their beverage. That’s why increasing amounts of industrial automation technology are being applied to wine-producing operations—for example, at麦克马尼斯家庭酒庄.
Bouchaine Vineyards is one of the latest examples of a vineyard adopting industrial automation technology with its implementation ofCisco Industrial Asset Visionsensors to track data, block by block, throughout its 100+ acres in the Carneros AVA (American Viticultural Area), which includes parts of Sonoma and Napa counties in California.
Cisco Industrial Asset Vision is comprised of 11 new Cisco sensors pre-integrated with a Cisco LoRaWan gateway and a new cloud-based data operations and management dashboard designed for asset and facility monitoring in outdoor or industrial indoor environments.Chris Kajani, Bouchaine winemaker and general manager, said, “For hundreds of years, much of grape growing has been based on anecdotal knowledge shared between generations of winegrowers, along with visual cues taken by walking the vineyards. Now this knowledge, which is so central to the traditions of great wines, can be digitized. This automatic accumulation of data with real time dashboards will give us insight across the lifetime of the vineyard. Cisco sensor technology allows us to gather data in real time, bringing us the ability to make site-specific grape growing decisions year after year based on our vineyard’s microclimates.”
More specifically, Cisco sensors are used to collect temperature, light, humidity, wind, and water over the course of the growing season. According to Cisco, the sensors are advanced enough to track details such as the amount of light hitting individual grapevines within each block, offering key insights into the tannin development of grapes. This kind of information enables Bouchaine to refine decisions on irrigation, leafing, and fruit thinning.
Wines from Bouchaine Vineyards.Throughout the 2021 growing season, Bouchaine monitored temperature, light, and humidity of individual vineyard blocks in more detail than they ever had before using Cisco’s sensor technologies.
“The Cisco sensors are helping us preserve one of our most precious resources—water,” Kajani said. “We’re using the data to water only when and where it’s absolutely necessary. The sensor data gives us peace of mind that we’ll see changes in the vineyard when there’s still time to take action.”
Cisco Industrial Asset Vision is an all-in-one product that includes different kinds of industrial sensors (for example, temperature, light, humidity), gateways that collect data from the sensors (which come from Cisco with batteries included), and a cloud-based dashboard on which to view the resulting data.
凭借思科工业资产视觉的粗鲁化传感器和网关旨在承受温度波动，雨和风。根据思科的说法，网关可以连接传感器在大面积上传播，减少用户需要购买和维护的网关数量。
Speaking to Cisco Industrial Asset Vision’s ease of installation, Kajani said, “Installing the sensors and gateways was as simple as scanning their bar codes. The whole solution was up and running within an hour.”
Based on results gathered during the 2021 growing season, Bouchaine is planning to install more sensors to understand the environment in smaller sections of the vineyard.
 |
Learn howCisco is helping the Dairy Farmers of America in its digital transformation. |
