The wine industry is full of exciting innovations, building on rich historical processes, to improve efficiency and drive modernisation through technology. Liv-ex is proud to be a part of that movement, as we work to make trading wine on the secondary market more transparent, efficient and safe.
Leveraging technology in wine production
Technology is being utilised throughout the wine production process. Producers are using satellite data and weather stations to monitor plant health in real time. By closely monitoring vine health, producers can focus their attention where it’s really needed, delivering improved wine quality and consistency and reducing wastage to increase margins.
Technology is also driving productivity, with apps that streamline vineyard management by capturing essential data to help growers make informed decisions and timely interventions. Vineyard managers can create crop sampling requests and record data in the field, sampling for pest and disease incidence and severity, and record grape maturity measures.
Wine producers are even using technology to spot opportunities in the market by analysing consumer habits and trends. The same technology is being used by buyers to identify the wines to stock that will best resonate best with their customers.
How is technology being used in the wine trade?
Wine producers and traders have traditionally adopted different naming conventions for their products: for example, Château Lafite is also known as Lafite Rothschild. While humans usually know a wine by different names, machines cannot tell the difference. As details of wines are commonly recorded more than ten times for a single transaction and repeated many times over in the life of a wine, this becomes a problem when automating trading processes or administration tasks. Liv-ex’s LWIN naming convention assigns unique codes to wines and spirits that can be read by any system. Best of all, it’s open source, and available for anyone to use at no cost.
An LWIN is a unique identification for every wine that encodes its name, vintage, pack and bottle size
With LWIN freely available to use, all businesses with an interest in wine and spirits – retailers, wholesalers, logistics providers, trade bodies and publications can now connect, share information, and automate easily. This ultimately removes ambiguity and increases confidence and efficiency across the whole supply chain.
Technology has improved areas of the primary market by providing merchants with specialised enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems tailored to the wine industry. They allow wine merchants to manage their business operations effortlessly, simplifying everything from inventory management, sales and purchase ordering to shipping and customer communication.
Over in the secondary market, Liv-ex has been improving the safety and transparency of trading wine on the secondary market for 25 years. Liv-ex provides one single place for the industry to go to buy and sell wine with over 600 members worldwide. Not only does Liv-ex provide exposure and open opportunities well beyond personal reach, we handle all of the logistics capabilities to create a seamless trading experience for all of our members.
Members can also integrate Liv-ex services and data into their own systems, enabling them to buy and sell wine even while they’re sleeping or on holiday. Today, around a third of trade on Liv-ex involves some sort of automation. On average, members of Liv-ex using automation sell more than twice the volume of other members, at an average of 7.8% higher price.
To find out how Liv-ex can support your business goals through technology and data, get in touch today.
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For more information on the technology we referenced, see Saturnalia, Vinea, Tastry, Wine Owners’ Wine Hub, Hweb Wine.
