Is AI coming for your winery job? Or is it here to make your cellar life easier? Our CTO sets the record straight on AI’s current capabilities in the wine sphere and offers insight into where it’s headed from here.
AI has splashed unavoidably across headlines in almost every industry lately, and wine is no exception. From chatbots to vineyard sensors, there’s plenty of speculation about what’s real, what’s hype, and what’s actually useful in the cellar today.
While exposure to AI technologies continues to grow among wine producers in the U.S., most AI adoption thus far has been limited to vineyard activities—a mere 4% of wineries report using AI in cellar operations outside of optical sorting and analyzing wine components. Which means that those few who are adopting AI in the cellar right now are probably benefiting from a strategic advantage over their competitors.
One of the reasons for such low adoption numbers is the fact that it’s difficult to navigate AI options right now. Simply put, there’s a lot of unproven tech with questionable business benefits, and savvy companies are wise to approach it all with a cautious eye.
So how can wineries best leverage AI without succumbing to empty hype? Fortunately, when it comes to demystifying wine and tech, we definitely know a guy—our very own CTO, Scott Barta. With a career spanning Apple, Netflix, and Google, he’s now channeling that experience into shaping the technology behind Blended’s winery operations platform, including our handy AI assistant, Barry. His perspective on AI in wine is both candid and refreshingly grounded.
From Silicon Valley to the Cellar
Barta didn’t start in wine, but his tech background reads like a who’s who of Silicon Valley. “I’ve had a really varied career doing software development in a lot of technologies at companies large and small,” he says. “I was at a division of Apple for a while; I was at Netflix back when they were just a DVDs-through-the-mail company; Google, and a number of others.”
That range, from bioinformatics to big data to consumer apps, is now being put to work in wine here at Blended. “This is really the best and most exciting chance I’ve had to build something really big from scratch and to see it grow and evolve,” Barta adds.
Meet Barry: AI with a Winery Vocabulary
Blended’s AI assistant, Barry, sits at the heart of our vision for making winery software even faster and more intuitive for busy cellar teams. It’s an AI implementation for the cellar that was specifically designed to save your team’s time. “After experimenting with AI in a few different places, we thought the most compelling way to use it would be to make our application even easier to use,” Barta explains.
Winery life doesn’t leave much time to sit at a desk or tap through endless screens. That’s why Barry is designed to bridge the gap between how winemakers naturally think about their work and how software represents it. “If you’re recording some workflow you don’t use very often, you may have to hunt around to find that button or menu option,” says Barta. “But with Barry, you can describe what you want with words, and the AI can translate that into the right software metaphors, which is easier and less mistake-prone.”
Barry also takes advantage of another key AI benefit: speed. “Barry is built on the OpenAI 4o-mini model,” Barta explains. “It offers really good speed and price point.” Combined with Blended’s efficient design, Barry can traverse all of your winery data and get you answers in mere seconds: “Much of the work to integrate AI was in taking our backend data, which is in an extremely flexible format, and translate it to something that the AI agent can readily understand.”
In other words: less screen time, more cellar time!
AI in Practice: What’s Happening Now
In an industry full of talk about AI extremes—utopia to apocalypse—Barta’s perspective brings balance. “I think AI is going through the same hype cycle that so many other technologies do, but at an even faster pace,” he says. “In some ways, the tech is definitely worth the buzz and is transformative, and in some ways it’s overhyped.” So we don’t expect any war with Skynet and Terminator robots to kick off anytime soon, thankfully.
But wineries don’t need to wait for the dust to settle to see real benefits right now. Some of the most practical AI applications are already in use, often without being labeled as such. “Optical sorters are AI,” Barta points out. “Other visual processing applications of AI are very important on the agriculture side already, from weather forecasting to using visual data to spot problem areas in the vineyard and fine-tune canopy management, sprays, and irrigation.”
As for the cellar? The gains might not be as flashy, but they’re no less real. “AI can play a role in easing the day-to-day data entry so you’re more likely to keep your records up-to-date, and let you actually get the benefits that software is supposed to provide—in terms of being more organized, preventing mistakes, and understanding your costs—while spending less time in front of a screen,” Barta explains.
Looking Ahead: Where AI Could Take Wineries
So where is this all headed? The next frontier, according to Barta, is about helping wineries get more value out of their existing data. “We’ve got a lot of data in our system, and I think Barry could someday help you get even more value out of it. In the Big Data world, there’s a cliché about the need to ‘turn data into insight,’ and I think AI might help you ask really specific questions about your winemaking data… in a way that’s more useful than staring at a canned report or playing around with a spreadsheet.”
He also sees potential in blending visual inputs into the mix: “We did some experiments with using AI to interpret handwritten temperature and brix data in fermentation tank sheets, and it seemed very promising,” he notes. While accuracy challenges remain, the vision is clear: a future where capturing, analyzing, and acting on winery data is faster and more seamless than ever.
AI That Lets Winemakers Focus on Wine
For Barta, the real promise of AI isn’t about replacing people, but empowering them. It’s about making software so quick and intuitive that cellar staff spend less time with keyboards and more time with barrels. Or as he puts it: “Sometimes it’s easier to describe what you want with words instead of poking around a report-builder UI.”
That philosophy runs through Blended’s vision: keep the tech smart, but keep it simple—so that wineries can focus on what really matters (the wine itself).
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