Author: Jean-Sébastien LASSERE

No-Alcohol Wine Meets Tech — Membrane Dealcoholisation: Science or Betrayal?

⏱️ Reading time: 7 minutes

In October 2025, an 1855 Premier Cru Classé of Sauternes did what was thought unthinkable: Château Sigalas-Rabaud announced a no-alcohol sweet wine. The symbolism is dizzying.

If one of the summits of French winegrowing agrees to remove ethanol from its wine, it’s because dealcoholisation is no longer a marketers’ whim but a groundswell. In France, the segment still accounts for only around 1% of the wine market by volume, but its sales jumped 12.7% in volume and 21.5% in value year on year. Globally, the IWSR values the no-alcohol wine market at nearly €2 billion in 2025, with a projection of €10 billion by 2030.

Behind this explosion lies a question that is anything but trivial: can you remove the alcohol from a wine without betraying it? For ethanol isn’t a simple “ingredient” you subtract. It carries part of the aromas, structures the palate, transports the volatile molecules to our nose. To remove it is to touch the very definition of the product. And at the heart of this debate, a discreet but omnipresent technology in French cellars: membrane dealcoholisation. Precision science to some, industrial denaturing to others. A deep dive.

WHEN THE MEMBRANE MOVES INTO THE CELLAR

A market that has stopped being a niche

The phenomenon is driven by a new category of consumers: the “flexi-drinkers”, who alternate between classic wine and no-alcohol alternatives. Nearly three-quarters of the French practise this back-and-forth. In 2025, 19% of them say they drink no-alcohol wine, and the most receptive targets aren’t committed abstainers but 25-to-49-year-olds keen to moderate their consumption. Dry January, now recognised by 71% of the consumers surveyed, has durably established the idea that you can raise a no-alcohol glass without looking like an overgrown teenager with a soda.

For winemakers, the argument is also economic. In a wine market in overall decline, dealcoholisation opens a double-digit-growth outlet — at an estimated processing surcharge of 10 to 20%. The question remains how, technically, you empty a bottle of its alcohol without emptying it of its soul.

REVERSE OSMOSIS: WINE THROUGH A MOLECULAR SIEVE

How a membrane separates alcohol from wine

Dealcoholisation by reverse osmosis

The principle of membrane techniques — one of the three processes authorised by European regulation, alongside vacuum evaporation and distillation — rests on reverse osmosis and nanofiltration. The wine is pushed under high pressure (up to 60 bar for a red, 40 for a white in reverse osmosis) through a membrane with microscopic pores. This lets a “permeate” through: a mix of water and alcohol, stripped of the larger molecules that make up the colour, the tannins and part of the wine’s body.

The operation takes place cold, at around 10 to 18°C, with no thermal shock. That’s its defenders’ key argument: where distillation heats the wine and risks “cooking” certain fragile aromatic compounds, the membrane works at cellar temperature. But the process has a physical limit: it requires several successive passes, since each cycle removes only a little alcohol. Reverse osmosis alone is therefore suited to adjusting the alcohol level (down to -20%) or to partial dealcoholisation, much less to total “zero alcohol”.

To go further, reverse osmosis is then coupled with a second stage that removes the alcohol from the permeate before returning the aqueous fraction to the wine. Two options: the membrane contactor, which extracts the ethanol by osmotic evaporation using water as a solvent (the recovered alcohol then measures only around 10%), or distillation of the permeate, more efficient (alcohol at 85%) and the only method capable of truly total dealcoholisation. Strictly membrane-based couplings, for their part, remain confined to a reasonable reduction of around 3% vol.

In other words, the membrane doesn’t destroy the alcohol: it displaces it, molecule by molecule, cold and under pressure. The whole debate, in reality, lies in what it leaves behind.

THE SCIENCE CAMP

“We’re not denaturing anything, we’re adjusting”

The membrane’s defenders first put forward a historical argument: adjusting the alcohol level by reverse osmosis is nothing new. For some thirty years, winemakers have used it to correct by a degree or two wines that are too concentrated in alcohol, particularly in very hot, dry vintages. With climate change pushing alcohol levels up, the oenologist Matthieu Dubernet noted as far back as Vinitech that this category, “which appeared only a decade ago, is no longer a niche and is becoming a market in its own right”. The technology is also compact, mobile, and the least costly way to remove a few degrees.

Then comes the cold argument. By avoiding any rise in temperature, reverse osmosis preserves a wine’s balance better than classic distillation — or so its promoters argue. Finally, the public-health argument: faced with a real demand for moderation, offering a 0.5% wine that keeps the codes of wine (the glass, the table, the sharing) rather than a soda is meeting a social need. Moderato’s co-founder, Fabien Marchand-Cassagne, observes that where dedicated corners were set up in stores, sales were “multiplied by four”. Proof, for this camp, that the product finds its audience as soon as you stop hiding it.

THE BETRAYAL CAMP

What the purists can’t stomach

The first criticism is oenological. Alcohol is a carrier of aromas: it transports the volatile molecules and gives the wine its volume in the mouth. Removing it amounts to amputating the wine of part of what makes it come alive. And here the membrane reveals its cruellest paradox: reverse osmosis, precisely because it works cold, doesn’t separate and then reincorporate the original aromas, unlike the most advanced vacuum-distillation systems that recover the volatile compounds to restore them. The method reputed to be the “gentlest” is also the one that struggles most to give the wine back its aromatic breadth.

Second grievance: the water footprint. Reverse osmosis coupled with a membrane contactor is very water-hungry. As the IFV points out, “in the end, the volume of water can exceed the volume of wine treated” — quite something for a sector that lays claim to terroir and environmental restraint. As for the membrane contactor used on its own, some professionals bluntly call it “dealcoholisation on the cheap”, because it tends to oxidise the wine.

The final blow is regulatory, and it’s symbolic. A fully dealcoholised wine (≤ 0.5% vol.) can claim no appellation: it drops down to Vin de France, losing both AOC and IGP. Only partial dealcoholisation remains open to geographical indications, and even then: in 2025, the National IGP Committee opened it only to a few pilot IGPs (Périgord, Comté Tolosan, Val de Loire), with an alcohol floor above 6%. For the guardians of the appellations, removing the alcohol means leaving wine as the terroir defined it. The brake is also visible on the consumer side: 58% still cite “taste and quality” as the main obstacle.

SCIENCE OR BETRAYAL? THE VERDICT IS YOURS

A definition of wine shifting before our eyes

The most striking thing is the speed at which the law is legitimising what purists contest. Before December 2021, the word “wine” was reserved for products measuring at least 8.5 or 9% alcohol. Since then, the CMO reform has authorised the labels “dealcoholised wine” and “partially dealcoholised wine”. In March 2025, a delegated regulation even opened organic certification to certain dealcoholised wines. And the “Wine Package” adopted in late 2025 introduces the label “no-alcohol wine” for products between 0 and 0.5% vol. Methodically, the regulations are making dealcoholisation a fully-fledged oenological practice.

One detail remains that speaks volumes. For its no-alcohol sweet wine, Château Sigalas-Rabaud didn’t choose the membrane: the operation was entrusted to Moderato, by vacuum column distillation at 30°C. As if, for a summit of Sauternes, aromatic preservation came before the membrane cold argument. “Membrane” technology dominates French cellars for alcohol adjustment and partial dealcoholisation; but as soon as it comes to aiming for excellence on a total zero-alcohol, finesse is often sought elsewhere.

So, science or betrayal? The membrane is probably both at once: an engineering feat that answers a real social expectation, and a compromise that reminds us, with every glass, that alcohol wasn’t just a flaw to be corrected. No-alcohol wine isn’t a fake wine — it’s a new object, borrowing the codes of wine without quite being one. It’s up to each of us to decide whether the boundary it crosses is a step forward or a red line.

So which side are you on — science or betrayal? Have you ever tasted a wine dealcoholised by membranes? Tell us in the comments.

Sources: DGCCRF / economie.gouv.fr (dealcoholisation and labelling rules, 2025) · Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/405 · INAO – National IGP Committee (March 2025) · IWSR · No/Low Barometer 2025 (Backline) · LSA Conso and Rayon Boissons (market figures, Jan. 2026) · IntoTheMinds (Jan. 2026) · Réussir Vigne (Sept. 2025) · Techniloire / Vinitech (M. Dubernet) · IFV (P. Cottereau) · B&S Tech · VINEAS – dealcoholisation by membrane coupling · desalcoolisation.com. Processes and figures verified as of 28 June 2026; regulatory thresholds and labels may change with the implementation of the “Wine Package”.

November 12, 2026
Measure, Steer, Predict: The Connected Cellar at the Threshold of Craft

⏱️ Reading time: 7 minutes

There’s an hour in the cellar that nobody photographs. The one at night, during harvest, when the cellar master walks down between the tanks one last time, lamp in hand, to take a density reading. The gesture is ancestral: a test tube, a floating hydrometer, a figure chalked down. For centuries, this is how a fermentation has been listened to — by feel, twice a day, in the cold and the smell of the must.

That gesture is disappearing. Not the fermentation, nor the cellar master — but the groping in the dark. A small float immersed in the tank now measures density on its own, every hour, and sends it to a phone. The vineyard has already had its digital revolution: drones, multispectral imaging, onboard sensors and artificial intelligence. Now it’s the cellar’s turn. Welcome to the connected cellar.

THE END OF THE PIPETTE SAMPLE

The sensor that never sleeps

For a long time, monitoring a fermentation meant one thing: dedicating an operator to it, twice a day, test tube in hand. Measuring density — the indicator that shows how much sugar is left to convert into alcohol — was as much a job of patience as of rigour.

© Unsplash — In a stainless-steel cellar, every tank becomes a permanent measurement point.

The breakthrough lies in a tiny object. The Densios, marketed by the French company Onafis, is a connected hydrometer that stays permanently in the tank. Its principle is nothing revolutionary — it’s the two-thousand-year-old one of Archimedes’ thrust: a float sinks further the denser the liquid is. What changes is that it measures alone, every hour, density and temperature, and sends the fermentation curve to an app. The cellar master no longer has to go down: they check remotely, and get an alert when a fermentation stalls or stops.

The sensor slips just as easily into a steel tank as into a barrel or an amphora — proof that even the oldest vessels are entering the data era. Other estates prefer the portable hydrometer, such as the Anton Paar DMA 35 used at Château Gloria, in Saint-Julien: every tank carries an RFID chip that the operator scans before taking a reading, which is logged without re-entry. Two philosophies — the fixed, smart sensor, or the precise, roaming instrument — for the same goal: never lose an hour, nor a data point, again.

“It’s a great product, easy, sturdy, and it saves us precious time.”
Mathilde Martinez, cellar master-oenologist, Cuers cooperative winery

FROM MEASUREMENT TO CONTROL: THE TANK THAT DRIVES ITSELF

When data acts on the wine

© Unsplash — On screen, fermentation becomes a curve that can be anticipated.

Measuring is only a first step. The real shift happens when data stops being a mere dashboard and becomes a command — when the tank, informed about itself, adjusts its own temperature.

That’s the promise of control solutions. A connected hydrometer can be linked to the cellar’s temperature-regulation software: as soon as fermentation runs away, cooling kicks in without intervention. Developers such as VinPilot go further, remotely controlling not only temperature but also pump-overs, oxygenation, even the level and pressure of closed tanks. On an estate in the Ardèche, a winemaker replaced manual regulation within a few days, cable by cable, for a handful of thousand euros: cellar automation is no longer reserved for large houses.

Italy’s Parsec offers another route, without immersion: its system sits atop the tank and reads fermentation activity through the slight CO2 overpressure it releases. The algorithm deduces, at every moment, the residual sugars and the physiological state of the yeasts, and makes it possible to steer vinification proactively — temperature, nutrition, extraction. In Savoie, a shared cooperative cellar, inaugurated in 2025, has taken this to its conclusion: its seventeen steel tanks are all temperature-regulated, connected, and remotely controllable. The tank, from now on, no longer simply ferments: it reports, it alerts, and sometimes, it decides. The logic of onboard sensors, already at work in vineyard robotics, has crossed the cellar door.

THE DIGITAL TWIN, OR FERMENTATION REHEARSED BEFORE IT’S LIVED

Redoing the harvest inside a computer

Beyond the sensor and the steered tank looms a more dizzying idea: what if a fermentation could be simulated before it’s lived? That’s the whole stake of the digital twin, that virtual replica fed in real time by data from the real world.

© Unsplash — The digital twin: a fermentation that exists twice, in the tank and in the model.

The principle, as defined by INRAE’s DIGIT-BIO metaprogramme, unfolds in three stages: sensors feed a model, the model predicts the system’s evolution, and that prediction allows action back on the real object. Applied to the tank, this would produce a digital double of the fermentation, able to anticipate a stall before it happens. In Spain, the DTWINE project, led by IATA-CSIC, is building precisely such a twin to simulate and forecast wine fermentation, paired with sensors and predictive control.

French research is not far behind. At the Pech Rouge experimental site, IFV, INRAE and Institut Agro Montpellier have designed a “Minicave” and its Vinimag robot, able to run more than a thousand micro-vinifications a year from a bank of frozen grapes, with online monitoring of temperature, colour and fermentation kinetics. Here, the harvest can be repeated at will, freed from the seasons. More broadly, INRAE’s Twin Farms project explores the digital twin “from vineyard to cellar,” extending to the cellar what the plot already experiments with.

“The digital twin of a living system is, above all, a research object.”
Simon Labarthe, INRAE researcher, Artemis network

THE TEMPTATION OF WINE WITHOUT SURPRISE

What data will never say

© Unsplash — Between the screen and the glass, the last word stays sensory.

One question no sensor can settle remains: by trying too hard to control fermentation, do we risk smoothing out the wine, erasing the happy accident, the singularity of a vintage?

Data has its blind spots. A sensor guarantees the accuracy of a measurement, not the soundness of a decision: it will say a fermentation is slowing down, never whether that slowdown will make a great wine. The cellar master’s craft remains, essentially, one of tasting and intuition — sensory analysis remains humanity’s sovereign territory, where no probe ventures.

There’s more. A whole strand of contemporary wine is built precisely against the idea of total control. Living, organic and natural wines claim a share of the unexpected, a refusal to be identical to themselves year after year. The return of amphorae and other “gentle technologies” comes from the same movement: steer less to let more happen. The connected cellar doesn’t abolish this debate — it shifts it. Nothing stops you slipping a sensor into an amphora: data can also serve to better understand letting go, not to prevent it. The sensor, in short, knows everything about a fermentation, except what it will be worth — that judgement, the cellar master never hands over.

WHERE IS THE CONNECTED CELLAR HEADING?

A cellar that listens, a person who decides

By 2026, the density sensor is no longer a curiosity: it’s quietly settling in, from cooperative wineries to classified growths. Like blockchain on the label or the drone above the rows, it’s becoming an expected piece of infrastructure rather than a feat. The next frontier is as much energy-related as oenological: a modern winery now controls its cooling, its heating, its humidity and its CO2 levels, yielding more consistent vintages and controlled consumption. The cellar becomes a system — temperature regulation, supervision, alerts — with the cellar master as conductor rather than performer.

This is perhaps where the real promise of the connected cellar lies: not to replace the hand and the palate, but to give them back their time. Fewer hours spent taking density readings in the cold, more spent tasting, comparing, deciding. Technology, here, doesn’t make the wine. It gives the winemaker back what is rarest of all — attention.

Do you prefer a wine “steered” down to the last sensor, or do you like knowing that some unpredictability remains in your glass? Tell us in the comments.

Sources: INRAE — Vinimag, vinification robot (Pech Rouge) · INRAE DIGIT-BIO — Towards digital twins · Techniques de l’Ingénieur — The digital twin of living systems (Artemis network) · Vitisphere — Densios / VinPilot · Réussir Vigne — Connected hydrometers & cellar automation · Vivelys — Densios / KYP platform

October 30, 2026
Wine in the Age of Climate Disruption: Threats, Adaptations and New Territories

⏱️ Reading time: 9 minutes

The thermometer climbs, harvests come earlier, terroirs shift. And the world map of wine isn’t quite what it was.

There’s something dizzying in what is unfolding before our eyes. Vines suffering where they had thrived for centuries. Whole regions watching their identity waver. And, the ultimate paradox, territories no one would once have dared to plant suddenly covering themselves in vines and producing wines that astonish the world.

Climate change is profoundly redrawing the world map of wine. Some legendary regions see their identity threatened; others, unexpected, emerge with new ambitions. Between tradition to preserve and innovation to embrace, winemakers the world over are living through a silent but radical revolution. An overview of a sector in accelerated transformation.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Figures that send a chill down the spine

The scientific data is unequivocal. According to a study published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment by INRAE, the CNRS and the universities of Bordeaux and Burgundy, around 90% of the coastal and low-lying wine regions of southern Europe and California risk losing their ability to produce quality wine by the end of the century, if global warming exceeds +2°C.

The world’s vineyards face an unprecedented acceleration of climate change. © Unsplash

The effects are already visible today. In most vineyards, the harvest begins two to three weeks earlier than forty years ago. In Saint-Émilion, the harvest date has moved forward a fortnight in just twenty-six years. In Alsace, the shift reaches twenty to twenty-five days compared with the 1990s. Grapes contain more sugar, less acidity, and the wines show rising alcohol levels — up to 17° for some Merlot-based Bordeaux.

“Around 90% of southern Europe’s coastal wine regions risk losing their ability to produce quality wine at economically sustainable yields by the end of the century.”
INRAE / Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, 2024

The +2°C threshold represents a critical tipping point: below it, winemakers can still adapt; beyond it, major upheavals become inevitable. Extreme weather events — late frosts, droughts, hail, heatwaves — are increasing in frequency and intensity. This is no longer a projection. It’s the daily reality of millions of winegrowers.

TRADITIONAL REGIONS UNDER PRESSURE

Bordeaux: Merlot in danger

In Bordeaux, the warming is paradoxical: so far, it has rather favoured wine quality by allowing better ripeness. But the limits are approaching. Merlot, Bordeaux’s dominant variety, copes less and less well with intense heat and ever earlier harvests. Fresh-fruit aromas — strawberry, blackcurrant — fade in favour of less complex jammy fruit, and the drop in acidity erodes the wines’ freshness.

As early as 2019, the Bordeaux vineyard set up an adaptation plan built around three lines: testing new grape varieties, funding varietal research, and reducing its carbon footprint. Some estates are already experimenting with alternative varieties such as Castets and Marselan, more heat-resistant. The VitAdapt project, launched with the CIVB and the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region after the 2003 heatwave, has for more than twenty years been testing some fifty alternative varieties alongside Merlot and Cabernet.

Burgundy: +1.3°C in sixty years

Repeated heatwaves stress the vines and dangerously advance grape ripeness. © Pixabay

In Burgundy, the average temperature over the growing season has risen by +1.3°C in six decades. The Stratagème project, funded by the Burgundy Wine Committee, has identified three adaptation techniques compatible with the appellations’ specifications: modulating leaf removal, adapting how the vine is pruned, and developing ground cover between the rows.

The 2025 vintage nevertheless showed this vineyard’s possible resilience, with production up +45% and healthy grapes with preserved acidity. A glimmer of hope in an anxiety-inducing context.

The south of France: water as an absolute emergency

In Occitanie, the region has launched a 2024-2026 wine-sector contract worth five million euros, built around fifteen measures: securing access to water, adapting production methods, reconquering markets. Drought hits the Pyrénées-Orientales and eastern Aude particularly hard. In neighbouring Piedmont, wine production fell by 12% in 2023 and 5% in 2024. The question, in fact, is no longer really whether the climate is changing, but how fast the industry can change with it.

THE REGIONS ON THE RISE

One of the great paradoxes of climate change in wine

While the south suffers, the north awakens. Territories no one would once have dared to plant are covering themselves in vines and producing wines that astonish. This geographical reversal is one of the most fascinating — and most unsettling — phenomena of our wine-making era.

England, Champagne’s unexpected rival

It’s probably the most spectacular success story. England, once too cold for winegrowing, is watching the chalky slopes of Kent and Sussex cover themselves in vines. Higher temperatures and longer growing seasons now allow the production of high-quality sparkling wines that rival French champagnes.

The English vineyard is undergoing spectacular expansion, notably in Kent and Sussex. © Wikimedia Commons

The geological similarities with Champagne — the same chalky soils — offer a naturally favourable terroir. Estates such as Nyetimber and Chapel Down have gained international recognition.

Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark: the unthinkable becomes reality

According to the INRAE-CNRS study, rising temperatures could lead to the development of new wine regions in Belgium, the Netherlands and as far as Denmark — a scenario unthinkable thirty years ago. The researchers even mention the horizon of 2067 for Bruges as a potential major wine region. In Sweden and Denmark, a fledgling wine industry is already developing, with cold-resistant varieties and innovative technologies such as geothermal soil-heating systems.

WHEN WINE MEETS TECH

The 21st-century vine won’t be grown like that of the 20th

This is where our favourite subject takes the stage. Faced with climate upheaval, the most innovative winegrowers no longer simply endure: they technologise. Advanced soil sensors measure moisture in real time at different depths, and transmit their data to artificial-intelligence systems that automatically adjust irrigation. These predictive algorithms make it possible to determine precisely when and where to act, reducing water consumption and plant-protection treatments.

Vitidrone: AI in the skies

Photo: Heitlinger & Burg Ravensburg – futurefarming.com

The French startup Vitidrone, born of a collaboration between a roboticist and a bioinformatician, perfectly illustrates this wine-tech convergence. Its deep-learning-equipped drones map a vineyard in a few minutes with millimetre precision, detect health anomalies — notably esca, a dreaded vine disease — and offer treatment recommendations plot by plot.

In the Bordeaux region, some estates have already adopted these solutions for daily monitoring of the health of their plots — a revolution for operations that used to manage this with the naked eye.

Winegrowing robotics takes to the rows

Companies such as Naïo Technologies, VitiBot and Agreenculture are developing autonomous robots able to prune, weed or monitor vine health with unprecedented precision. These robots work even on slopes — up to 58% for some models — where tractors can’t reach. Beyond yield, their ecological impact is significant: fewer inputs, soil preservation, less compaction. Today’s winemakers look as much like engineers as farmers — and that blend of skills is precisely where their strength lies.

We’d already begun telling you about it last year:

La robotique au service de la viticulture

Resistant grape varieties, the real silent revolution

Varietal research is the other great revolution. In February 2026, the French Journal Officiel confirmed the registration of eleven new resistant varieties in the official Catalogue of vine plants. These disease-resistant varieties — against downy and powdery mildew — make it possible to drastically reduce fungicide treatments while adapting to hotter climatic conditions. In Bordeaux, estates are already testing Castets and Marselan as alternatives to Merlot. In Burgundy, winemakers are enthusiastically experimenting with these new varieties.

THE QUESTION OF APPELLATIONS

When climatic necessity shifts the lines

Climate change also raises a major institutional question: should appellations be allowed to evolve to permit the integration of new grape varieties? The answer is beginning to take shape. In France, the INAO has authorised, on an experimental basis, the introduction of adaptation varieties in certain AOCs, notably in Bordeaux. It’s a small revolution: for decades, the specifications were set in stone. Climatic necessity is shifting lines once thought immutable.

It’s not unlike the debate over natural wines, where the question of appellation compliance arises with the same sharpness. In both cases, it’s the very definition of terroir that is being rewritten.

AND TOMORROW?

The wine map of 2100 won’t look like that of 2000

INRAE’s researchers envisage several scenarios. The innovative scenario — the favoured one — bets on technical innovations: new grape varieties, precision irrigation, robots, artificial intelligence, as detailed by the INRAE LACCAVE project (2012-2021). But there’s also a nomadic scenario, more radical: envisaging, over the long term, a gradual relocation of vineyards according to the new suitable climatic zones, a hypothesis documented by Touzard et al. in the journal Climatologie (2022).

This isn’t science fiction. It’s already happening, plot by plot, estate by estate, region by region. Climate change is the greatest challenge world winegrowing has ever had to face. But it’s also, paradoxically, a tremendous catalyst for innovation. And while terroirs shift, while Bordeaux questions itself and England covers itself in vines, one certainty remains: the wine world has never been more inventive than when its back is against the wall.

Have you ever tasted an English or Scandinavian wine? Do you think tech can save the traditional grands crus? Share your experience in the comments.

Sources: INRAE / CNRS / Nature Reviews Earth and Environment (2024) · Vinofutur (2025) · Info-vin.com · Réussir Vigne · Inria / Vitidrone · Occitanie Region · Chambre d’agriculture France · Vin-malin.fr

October 22, 2026
The Grapevine Genome: When DNA Becomes a Weapon Against Fungicides

⏱️ Reading time: 6 minutes

The grapevine is one of the most heavily treated crops in France — the second-largest consumer of plant-protection products, according to INRAE. The culprits: two fungi imported from North America in the nineteenth century, downy mildew (Plasmopara viticola) and powdery mildew (Erysiphe necator), against which Vitis vinifera, our European vine, is genetically defenceless. For nearly 150 years the response has been chemical: spray, and spray again. But since 2007 another path has opened — and it begins with reading the vine’s DNA.

IT ALL BEGINS BY READING THE DNA

Reading the grapevine’s DNA

In 2007, a French–Italian consortium led by INRA published the first grapevine genome in Nature. It was a world first for a fruit plant, only the fourth flowering plant to be sequenced. To ease the assembly, the researchers chose not a commercial variety but PN40024, a Pinot Noir–derived line made almost fully homozygous through successive self-fertilisations. The result: around 30,000 genes spread across 19 chromosomes.

That reference genome has been refined ever since. In 2023, an international team published a gapless “telomere-to-telomere” (T2T) version in Horticulture Research: 9,018 more genes than the previous version, and above all 377 gene clusters associated with complex traits — among them aroma and disease resistance. And that is the whole point: a complete genome is a map that makes it possible to locate resistance genes precisely and put them to use.

Rpv, Run, Ren: the resistance map

Against its two enemies, the vine has resistance genes that have been identified and named. Those that counter downy mildew are labelled Rpv (Resistance to Plasmopara viticola) — some thirty loci recorded to date. Those that counter powdery mildew carry the prefixes Run and Ren (Erysiphe necator) — about fifteen identified.

The crucial point: these genes don’t exist in Vitis vinifera. They come from wild American and Asian species that co-evolved with the fungi over millions of years — foremost among them Muscadinia rotundifolia, source of the famous Run1/Rpv1 pair located on chromosome 12, but also Vitis riparia, V. amurensis and V. labrusca.

Knowing the genome radically changes selection. Rather than waiting years to see whether a young plant resists infection, breeders read a DNA marker directly, as early as the seedling stage: this is marker-assisted selection (MAS). Better still, they can pyramid — stack at least two resistance genes targeting different mechanisms within a single variety. A fungus can mutate to get around one gene; to clear two or three locks it would have to mutate on several at once. This is the very principle of “durable resistance.”

CUTTING TREATMENTS TENFOLD

ResDur: cutting treatments tenfold

This is exactly the strategy of the INRAE-ResDur programme (for “durable resistance”), launched back in 2000 at Colmar under Didier Merdinoglu. The goal: to create wine-grape varieties resistant to downy and powdery mildew while keeping an oenological quality comparable to classic varieties. It takes an average of fifteen years of crossing and selection to produce a single variety.

The results are now in the vineyards. Four first varieties — Artaban and Vidoc (reds), Floreal and Voltis (whites), each carrying two downy-mildew and two powdery-mildew resistance genes — were entered in the Official Catalogue in 2018. Five more followed in 2021 (Coliris, Lilaro, Sirano, Selenor, Opalor), then three in 2024 (Calys, Exelys, Artys), fitted with new gene combinations to diversify the resistances. A ResDur3 series has been in the registration pipeline since 2025.

The agronomic gain is spectacular: 80 to 90% fewer fungicides than with a susceptible variety. One important nuance, often smoothed over in media shorthand: INRAE recommends keeping a minimum of two treatments per year. Not because the varieties are weak, but to keep pathogens from eroding the resistance — durability has to be protected. The OSCAR observatory (INRAE-IFV, created in 2017) monitors precisely these risks of resistance breakdown in growers’ plots.

On the ground, Floreal has become a best-seller — nearly 700 hectares on its own — thanks to an aromatic profile “strongly Sauvignon in character.” One major regulatory obstacle remains: long treated as hybrids, these varieties were recently attached to the Vitis vinifera taxon by the Community Plant Variety Office, an essential condition for one day laying claim to appellations. Christian Huyghe, INRAE’s scientific director for Agriculture, notes that “in France, there’s a trauma around hybrids” — even though the ResDur varieties kept nothing of Muscadinia but the resistance genes, everything else being vinifera.

ResDur varieties are obtained through conventional crossbreeding, accelerated by reading the genome. No in-vitro manipulation of the DNA: this is not a GMO.
Synthesis of INRAE–IFV work on resistant varieties

Tomorrow, CRISPR?

Conventional crossing has two limits: its slowness (fifteen years), and the fact that it reshuffles the entire genome. Crossing a Cabernet Sauvignon to add a resistance gene yields something other than a Cabernet. Genome editing promises the opposite: to modify a single gene within the existing variety, without touching its identity.

The most studied target in the vine is the MLO gene family (Mildew Locus O), which paradoxically makes the plant susceptible to powdery mildew. Deactivating them yields resistance through a “loss of susceptibility.” In 2025, Loredana Moffa’s team showed in The Plant Journal that a double CRISPR/Cas9 edit of the MLO6-7 genes confers resistance to powdery mildew, while editing the NPR3 gene increases tolerance to powdery mildew and downy mildew alike — via a cisgenic approach potentially free of any transgene. An honest scientific caveat: knocking out the MLO genes is sometimes accompanied by side effects (leaf necrosis, yield loss) that still have to be brought under control.

That leaves the regulatory lock, which has just been released. On 17 June 2026, the European Parliament gave final approval to the regulation on new genomic techniques (NGTs). It distinguishes two categories: NGT 1 plants (at most 20 modifications, “which could occur naturally or through conventional breeding”), largely exempt from GMO constraints, with no risk assessment; and NGT 2 plants, which remain regulated as GMOs. A historic shift: until now, these editing techniques were treated as GMOs, banned from cultivation in the EU.

The text remains divisive. Its defenders — rapporteur Jessica Polfjärd, INRAE — see it as a tool against climate change and disease. Its opponents — organic farming, environmental NGOs — denounce the absence of labelling, the risk of contaminating organic plots and the lack of risk assessment; France’s Anses agency itself recommended a “case-by-case” analysis in 2024. And the question of patents on living organisms remains wide open. One clarification is needed to avoid conflating everything: the ResDur varieties are not covered by this regulation — the debate concerns the next generation, that of vines edited gene by gene.

HOW FAR SHOULD WE MODIFY THE VINE TO SAVE IT?

The real divide is no longer scientific

In twenty years, genomics will have transformed the vine: from a passive victim of imported fungi, it has become a plant we can deliberately arm, gene by gene. Science now knows how to read the DNA, map the resistances, stack them and — soon — edit them. The real fault line has shifted: it no longer runs through the laboratory, but through society. How far are we prepared to modify the vine to save it?

And you — would you drink a wine from a resistant variety? A wine from a vine edited with CRISPR? Tell us in the comments.

Sources: French–Italian Public Consortium for Grapevine Genome Characterization, Nature (2007); Shi et al., Horticulture Research — PN40024 T2T genome (2023); INRAE — ResDur programme releases (2018, 2021, 2024) and the OSCAR observatory; IFV — resistant varieties; Moffa et al., The Plant Journal — CRISPR/Cas9 editing of MLO6-7 and NPR3 (2025); European Parliament — regulation on new genomic techniques (17 June 2026); Anses — NGT opinion (2024); Réussir Vigne, Pleinchamp, Vitisphère. Data cross-checked in July 2026.

October 8, 2026
Pinot Noir: Why Does the World’s Most Difficult Grape Variety Fascinate Winemakers and Wine Lovers Alike?
📚 Grape Varieties of the World · Episode 3 | ⏱ Reading time: 7 minutes

It’s often said to be the most thankless grape to grow and the most rewarding to drink. Thin-skinned, early-ripening, hypersensitive to the slightest shift in terroir or climate, Pinot Noir tests even the most seasoned winemakers. And yet it is precisely from this fragility that some of the most sought-after, most expensive and most enigmatic wines on the planet are born.

For this third episode of our Grape Varieties of the World series, we dive into the history of a grape as old as European viticulture itself, incapable of lying about where it comes from.

A Grape as Old as Rome, as Elusive as the Wind

Unlike Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay, born from an identifiable crossing at a relatively recent point in time, Pinot Noir has no known birth date. Ampelographers agree that it ranks among the oldest grape varieties cultivated in Europe, probably descended from successive crossings and mass selections carried out on wild vines (Vitis vinifera sylvestris) as far back as Roman times. Latin writings already attest to the presence of a fine, productive vine in Burgundy nearly two thousand years ago.

It was later the Benedictine and then Cistercian monks who, from the Middle Ages onward, patiently mapped the best plots of the Côte-d’Or, laying the foundations of what are known today as the climats of Burgundy — inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 2015. A meticulous, plot-by-plot work of observation that revealed just how much Pinot Noir changes character over a shift of just a few metres.

🔬 The Science of Genetic Chaos

Pinot Noir holds a rather unenviable record: it is one of the most genetically unstable grape varieties known. Its DNA structure favours the spontaneous appearance of somatic mutations, which explains the existence of hundreds of clones with differing characteristics (the famous clone 777 or the Pommard clone, for example). More surprising still: Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc are not cousins born of a cross, but direct colour mutations of Pinot Noir — genetically almost the exact same plant, one pigmentation gene apart. Pinot Meunier, widely grown in Champagne, is another such variation. Where Chardonnay was born from a cross between two distinct varieties, Pinot Noir generates its own variants by mutating in place.

From the Côte de Nuits to Oregon: Four Faces of a Fragile Grape

Few red grape varieties are as transparent as Pinot Noir about their terroir of origin. Its colour is pale, its tannins discreet, but its ability to faithfully render a soil, an aspect or a climate is almost without equal. Four major expressions illustrate this diversity:
- 🇫🇷 Côte de Nuits, Burgundy (Gevrey-Chambertin, Vosne-Romanée, Chambolle-Musigny) — limestone and marl soils, wines of great precision, fine tannic structure, exceptional ageing potential. The most revered expression of Pinot Noir in the world
- 🇫🇷 Champagne — the region’s second most-planted grape, it brings structure, body and power to blends, and produces rare Blanc de Noirs of remarkable depth
- 🇺🇸 Oregon (Willamette Valley) — a cool climate close to Burgundy’s, volcanic and sedimentary soils, silky and aromatic wines that became an American benchmark in barely forty years
- 🇳🇿 New Zealand (Central Otago, Martinborough) — pronounced day/night temperature swings, vivid fruit and vibrant acidity, one of the most dynamic styles of the past decade
To this list could be added Germany, where Pinot Noir — known locally as Spätburgunder — has seen considerable growth over the past twenty years, driven by terroirs such as the Ahr and Baden, long underrated outside Germany’s borders.

The Wines That Built Its Legend

A few landmark references that explain why Pinot Noir fascinates so many:
- 🇫🇷 Romanée-Conti & La Tâche (Domaine de la Romanée-Conti) — the most highly valued red wines in the world, produced on a handful of hectares in Vosne-Romanée
- 🇫🇷 Chambertin (Domaine Armand Rousseau) — power and depth, the grand cru Napoleon is said to have preferred above all others
- 🇫🇷 Musigny (Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé) — absolute finesse and elegance, often described as the most “feminine” grand cru of the Côte de Nuits
- 🇫🇷 Bollinger Vieilles Vignes Françaises — a Champagne Blanc de Noirs made from ungrafted Pinot Noir vines that escaped phylloxera, of absolute rarity
- 🇺🇸 Domaine Drouhin Oregon — proof that the Willamette Valley could produce Pinot Noir worthy of Burgundy
- 🇳🇿 Felton Road (Central Otago) — New Zealand’s benchmark, carried by a spectacular high-altitude terroir
A Style Built on Nuance

Pinot Noir never chases power. Its colour is among the palest of the red grape varieties, its tannins fine and silky, its acidity naturally lively. It is a grape of nuance rather than force, capable of moving from crisp red fruit to notes of forest floor, leather and mushroom with age.

This subtlety makes Pinot Noir extremely sensitive to winemaking decisions: full or partial destemming, the proportion of whole-cluster fermentation, maceration length, extraction level, choice of oak. Two neighbouring winemakers, on the same appellation, can produce radically different wines from the same grape — a trait that partly explains why enthusiasts are so fascinated by the differences in “hand” between producers.

🍷 Classic Tasting Note

👃 Colour: Pale to ruby red, garnet hues with age, characteristic transparency
👃 Nose: Cherry, raspberry, wild strawberry, violet (youthful style) · forest floor, leather, mushroom, sweet spice (evolved style)
👄 Palate: Fine, silky tannins, lively acidity, light to medium body, elegant, persistent finish
🍽️ Food pairing: Roast poultry, duck, salmon, mushrooms, soft-rind cheeses, autumn cooking

Pinot Noir and Climate Change

Few grape varieties are as exposed to global warming as Pinot Noir. Early budbreak, thin skins, compact bunches prone to rot: every one of its historic traits is becoming a vulnerability in the face of today’s climate hazards. The spring frosts of 2016, 2017 and 2021 devastated entire swathes of the Burgundy vineyard, precisely because of this early budbreak.

Increasingly early harvests also raise a stylistic challenge: Pinot Noir, a grape defined by finesse and freshness, risks losing precisely what makes it singular if alcohol levels keep climbing and acidity keeps falling. To preserve this balance, Burgundy winemakers are picking earlier in the morning, moving their plots to higher altitude and re-assessing their vineyards’ aspect.

The grape is meanwhile conquering new territories once considered too cool: Kent in the south of England, Tasmania, certain high-altitude valleys of Argentine and Chilean Patagonia, and even promising trials in Sweden. All regions that could, in the coming decades, become new heartlands for a grape that has always needed coolness to fully express itself.

Why It Remains Essential

Temperamental, demanding, at times exhausting for those who grow it: Pinot Noir sets its own terms rather than bending to the winemaker. But it is precisely this integrity that sets it apart. Where other grape varieties chase power or consistency, Pinot Noir chases the truth of a place, even when that truth is hard to obtain.

From the Côte de Nuits to Oregon, via New Zealand and Germany, it continues to prove that a grape doesn’t need to be easy to be great — it simply has to stay faithful to where it comes from.

Did you know?
Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Meunier are not different grape varieties from Pinot Noir: they are colour mutations of the very same plant. Genetically, they are almost the same grape — proof that Pinot Noir hasn’t finished surprising geneticists.
📌 Key Takeaways
- One of the oldest grape varieties in Europe, grown in Burgundy since Roman times
- Extreme genetic instability — gave rise to Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Meunier through mutation
- 4 major expressions: Côte de Nuits · Champagne · Oregon · New Zealand
- Climats of Burgundy listed as UNESCO World Heritage since 2015
- Early budbreak and thin skin — highly vulnerable to spring frosts and climate change
- Conquering new cool-climate territories: England, Tasmania, Patagonia, Sweden
Sources: UNESCO — inscription of the Climats of the Burgundy vineyard as World Heritage (4 July 2015) · Vezzulli et al., “Pinot blanc and Pinot gris arose as independent somatic mutations of Pinot noir,” Journal of Experimental Botany, 2012 · BIVB and Réussir Vigne — spring frosts in Burgundy, 2016, 2017 and 2021.

➡️ Next Episode — 30th November

For a long time, it was considered a second-tier grape, good for producing volume rather than emotion. Ripped out by the thousands of hectares in the 1980s, it is today experiencing one of the most beautiful revivals in Mediterranean viticulture, carried by old, forgotten vines and a remarkable resistance to drought.

Next up: Carignan — how did a long-despised grape become one of viticulture’s great hopes in the face of climate change?
October 3, 2026
Blockchain and Wine: Beyond the Buzz, a Quiet but Real Revolution
⏱️ Reading time: 6 minutes

Blockchain won’t wipe out counterfeiting overnight. But bottle after bottle, it’s drawing the infrastructure of a wine market where every grand cru will, at last, have a tamper-proof memory.

Every year in the European Union, counterfeit wines and spirits cause losses estimated at €2.4 billion, according to the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) — with French AOPs the first victims. Behind that figure lies a reality many consumers are unaware of: a far-from-negligible share of the bottles circulating on the secondary market don’t contain what their label promises.

This problem isn’t new. But it’s taking on a new dimension as grands crus establish themselves as investment assets. In 2022, the average price of a bottle at auction reached €194, up 40% on 2021. When value rises, forgers follow. It’s in this context that blockchain has established itself as a credible technological response — provided you understand what it really does, and what it doesn’t.

WHAT BLOCKCHAIN REALLY CHANGES

A technology in the service of traceability

Blockchain, in its simplest definition, is a shared, tamper-proof, decentralised ledger. Any information recorded in it can be neither modified nor deleted. Applied to wine, this property opens up very concrete possibilities.

© Unsplash — By scanning a QR code, the consumer gains real-time access to a bottle’s full traceability.

Each bottle can be recorded on the chain with a set of information all its own: grape variety, vintage, region of production, growing methods, harvest dates. Once entered, this data can no longer be altered. A consumer who scans a QR code on the back label gains access to this entire history — from vineyard to cellar, from bottling to the distributor’s warehouse.

Blockchain alone isn’t enough, though: you still have to link the physical bottle to its digital identity. That’s where NFC or RFID chips come in. Some solutions position the chip so that it’s destroyed when the bottle is opened, preventing any fraudulent reuse. Platforms such as WineDex can record up to 90 types of data per bottle — from a high-resolution photo to the ownership history, taking in storage conditions along the way.

Concrete players have already taken the plunge. Château Le Puy, a respected Bordeaux estate, has partnered with the company VeChain to integrate blockchain into its production. The Italian startup Ez Lab has built a platform called AgriOpenData on the Algorand blockchain, whose first wine use case dates back to 2016. In 2025-2026, solutions such as WineDex and Intercellar create digital certificates of authenticity for each bottle, making it possible to trace its complete journey from production to sale.

What these platforms guarantee, in essence, comes down to a simple principle: once entered, data can no longer be altered. Each bottle ends up with a memory that no one can falsify after the fact.

NFTS AND WINE: THE HYPE HAS FADED, AND THAT’S GOOD NEWS

From speculation to real usefulness

There was a time when NFTs seemed to be the future of collectible wine. In 2021 and 2022, several great houses launched experiments: Château Angélus with its 2020 vintage tied to digital tokens, promising exclusive access, virtual tours, private invitations. The promise was seductive.

© Unsplash — The NFT bubble of 2021-2022 has given way to a gradual maturing of the digital-asset market.

Today, we have to face reality. In the first quarter of 2025, only 7 million NFT trades were recorded on dedicated platforms, for $1.5 billion in transactions — far from the peaks of 2021. In France, in early 2025, only 3% of those surveyed said they owned an NFT, a figure on the decline.

Carrefour, Renault, Lacoste, Ubisoft: examples of big brands quietly abandoning their NFT projects have multiplied. But beware of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. An NFT can allow a bottle of wine to become “phygital”: its physical reality is paired with a unique, tamper-proof digital identity certifying its origin, its vintage, its logistical conditions, even its environmental transparency. What was a speculative promise in 2021 can become a serious traceability tool in 2026 — provided it’s stripped of its financial aura.

The discreet, functional NFT, invisible to the end consumer but valuable to the players in the value chain: that’s where the realistic future of the technology in wine lies.
✓ What NFTs bring to wine

A unique, tamper-proof digital identity for each bottle

Certification of origin, vintage and logistics

Environmental and social transparency

Traceability of successive owners

Exclusive experiences for collectors
✕ What the bubble revealed

Valuations disconnected from any real usefulness

Projects abandoned for lack of lasting communities

Technical complexity out of reach of the general public

Speculation taking priority over concrete use

95% of artistic NFT collections valued at zero in 2024
THE REAL OBSTACLES WE DON’T TALK ABOUT ENOUGH

Three structural obstacles to adoption

The data-entry problem. Blockchain guarantees that what is recorded cannot be modified. But it doesn’t guarantee that what is recorded is true. If an operator enters false information at the outset, the chain immortalises it. Trust still rests on human actors.

Cost and complexity. For a small estate of a few hectares, deploying a blockchain solution represents an investment in time, training and infrastructure that can seem disproportionate to the immediate perceived gain.

The absence of a universal standard. There’s still no protocol shared across the whole sector. Each platform — VeChain, Ethereum, Algorand, proprietary solutions — operates in its own ecosystem, which complicates matters for players downstream in the chain.

WHERE ARE WE IN 2026, AND WHERE ARE WE HEADED?

An infrastructure quietly settling in

Blockchain now plays a recognised role in the fine-wine market, in response to growing demand for transparency from collectors and investors. It’s no longer an experimental technology reserved for startups — it’s gradually becoming an expected standard in the high-end segment.

@zertifier.com — The fine-wine market is the quickest to adopt blockchain traceability solutions.

The next step will no doubt be integration with artificial intelligence: systems able to cross-reference blockchain data with spectrometric analyses to automatically detect anomalies in a bottle’s chemical composition. Authentication would no longer be merely administrative — it would become physical and scientific.

In Asian markets — and notably in China, the leading export destination for French grands crus —, blockchain is already establishing itself as a particularly relevant tool in the fight against counterfeiting. Verifying the authenticity of imported products is a major commercial issue there, and the technology finds natural ground for adoption.

Vigilance remains essential, especially on online sales sites, where consumers remain most exposed to fraud. Blockchain won’t eliminate that risk overnight, but it is already, bottle by bottle, cutting it down to size.

Have you ever scanned a QR code on a bottle of wine? Did the information available seem useful and reliable to you? Share your experience in the comments.

Sources: EUIPO — European Union Intellectual Property Office · The Conversation — NFTs in wine (Dec. 2025) · France Info — NFT review 2025 · Tudigo — The fine wines & spirits market 2025 · Isagri — Wine traceability and technology
September 24, 2026
Château Minuty in Gassin: inside the cellar of a Provence Cru Classé

⏱ 6 min

Some names, in the world of wine, need no introduction. Minuty is one of them.

Perched on the hills of Gassin, between schist and clay, the estate has grown its vines in gobelet training since 1936, under the stewardship of the Matton-Farnet family. One of the 18 Crus Classés de Provence since 1955, no less.

We went to understand what lies behind the unmistakable pale hue of their rosés. We left with a history lesson, an impressive cellar, and the discovery of a red we weren’t expecting.

A terroir shaped by the mistral and the sea

Gassin looks out over the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, and it shows in every bottle.

The vines, trained low in gobelet fashion, sink their roots into schist and clay soils, sculpted by constant sea spray. The mistral plays the same role here as it does in Ramatuelle: it cools, disciplines, and shapes rosés with a paleness that has become the estate’s signature. It’s no accident that Minuty has established itself, year after year, as a reference point for Provence rosé.

A family story since 1936

Founded in the 19th century and rebuilt under Napoleon III, Château Minuty has belonged to the Matton-Farnet family since 1936. One of the 18 Crus Classés de Provence since 1955, which says a great deal about the rigour behind every bottle.

What strikes you on arrival is the contrast between the quiet elegance of the façade and the scale of the work happening behind it. The tasting counter, tucked beneath a cascade of rosé bottles hanging from the ceiling, sums up the spirit of the place perfectly: serious in its craft, light in its atmosphere.

Inside the cellar

Stepping into Minuty’s cellar, you understand that the estate’s reputation isn’t built on a beautiful terroir alone.

Entire rows of barrels, some engraved with the estate’s name, stretch out as far as the eye can see. A terracotta jar, discreet among the oak casks, is a reminder that Minuty also explores older ageing methods. Nothing is left to chance: every choice of vessel shapes the wine’s final character.

The cuvées that make the estate’s reputation

The 281 is Minuty at its most accomplished. A single parcel of old Grenache vines, hand-harvested and vinified without compromise. The estate’s top of the range, plain and simple.

The Rouge et Or, on the other hand, surprises. You come looking for rosé and leave won over by a spicy, generous red, far from the image the estate is usually known for.

And then there’s the “Limited Edition Lucia Vinti” display, a reminder that Minuty doesn’t just make good wine: the estate also cultivates the art of presentation, right down to its most exclusive editions.

Behind the signature paleness of its rosés, Château Minuty hides a cellar that rivals the greatest estates, and a red that deserves your attention.

September 20, 2026
Behind the scenes at Domaine des Tournels

⏱ 6 min

We came for a tasting. We left with a lot more than that.

Domaine des Tournels is, first and foremost, an address: perched on the hills of Ramatuelle, facing the bay of Pampelonne, between sea and hills. A vineyard named after a play of light, the « tournels » that dance across the Mediterranean on calm days.

We went there to taste two cuvées. We left with a full tour, from the cellar to the bottling line, and a fair amount of respect for what actually goes into a bottle of rosé.

A terroir shaped by the mistral

The soil here tells a story of schist and clay, sculpted by centuries of sea spray and wind.

The mistral is more than a local climate quirk. It cools the vines in the height of summer, keeps disease at bay, and imposes its own discipline on vines trained low and close together, built to bend rather than break.

The proximity to the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, barely a few kilometres as the crow flies, explains much of the freshness you find later in the glass. Tibouren, a confidential and deeply Provençal grape, thrives here like nowhere else.

Behind the scenes of production

What strikes you on arrival is the contrast between the estate’s elegant façade and the near-industrial activity happening just behind it.

Crates full of freshly filled bottles wait their turn. A machine runs non-stop, carefully placing each « Domaine des Tournels » label onto the still-damp glass. Nothing is left to chance: every step of the line contributes to the consistency expected of an estate this size.

And yet, behind this well-oiled machine, a family signature remains. On the old wine press displayed in front of the building, « Aix-en-Provence » is engraved into the rusted metal, a quiet reminder of a craft passed down through generations, long before modern bottling lines arrived.

A wall that speaks of rigour

You can’t miss the wall of awards, right above the tasting bottles.

Bronze medal at the Concours Général Agricole in Paris 2022, silver in 2023, gold at the same competition in 2025. Several Vins de Provence distinctions, a High Environmental Value label. Tangible proof that it takes more than a beautiful terroir: it takes discipline to express it, year after year.

Two cuvées, two faces of the estate

The Rayne cuvée is Domaine des Tournels at its sunniest. White peach, citrus zest, a saline finish that gives away the estate’s closeness to the sea without any subtlety.

The Marie-Nicole cuvée tells a different story. A tribute to family history, carried through an almost see-through robe and a face quietly embossed on the label. Two wines, two ways of approaching the same terroir.

Behind every label at Domaine des Tournels, there’s a bottling line that never stops running, and a family story that refuses to fade.

September 19, 2026
Vivino and the Battle of the Rating Apps — Who Really Owns Wine Data?

⏱️ Reading time: 7 minutes

There’s something strange about pulling out your phone in front of a bottle of wine. A trivial gesture for sixty million users — and yet it raises a question few people put into words: who, ultimately, owns the opinion you’ve just left?

We’ve grown used to scanning labels, rating wines between two mouthfuls, following the recommendations of an algorithm that knows us better than our wine merchant. Vivino has slipped into our evenings with remarkable discretion, to the point of becoming an invisible infrastructure of taste. Behind that simplicity, however, lies a more complex reality: a silent battle for ownership of the world’s wine data. Who rates, who collects, who monetises, who decides? The question isn’t only economic. It touches on what we take to be expertise, trust, and the memory of wine.

A DANE WHO KNEW NOTHING ABOUT WINE BUILT THE WORLD’S LARGEST WINE DATABASE

The empire of the scan

Heini Zachariassen didn’t understand wine. A Faroese entrepreneur who came from cybersecurity, he often recounts that founding moment: finding himself lost in front of a supermarket shelf, unable to choose between one elegant label and another. “I didn’t know what to buy. There were only sophisticated labels and prices.” In 2010, with Theis Søndergaard, he co-founded Vivino in Copenhagen. The idea fits in one line: photograph a label to instantly get reviews from the community. A Shazam for wine.

The gesture that became universal: scanning before choosing.

Fourteen years later, the app boasts more than 60 million downloads, a database of 16 million wines catalogued, 200 million ratings and 1.5 billion label photos collected by its users. Vivino is today regarded as the largest online wine marketplace in the world — and the largest wine database ever built, fed free of charge by its own community. The company has raised more than $220 million in venture capital, including $155 million in a round led by the Swedish fund Kinnevik in 2021.

“No one else can do what we do, because no one else has access to the kind of data we own.”
Heini Zachariassen, founder of Vivino, at the opening of the first physical shop in Singapore, September 2024

YOU ARE THE USER, THE COMMUNITY — AND THE RAW MATERIAL

The question no one asks

© Unsplash — Behind every scanned label, a data point joins a proprietary database.

Every rating you leave, every bottle you scan, every preference you express: all of it feeds a proprietary database, owned by a private company, financed by venture capital. You are at once the customer, the contributor and the resource. This isn’t a criticism in itself — Wikipedia runs on a comparable model. But the essential difference is that Vivino monetises that contribution.

The recommendation algorithm, the “Match for You” feature that calculates your personal affinity with a wine based on your tasting history, the recently launched AI Sommelier — everything rests on the data users have generated without pay. In 2024, Vivino opened its first physical shop in Singapore, whose selection was built entirely from the behavioural data of its local users. As Zachariassen himself puts it: “No one else can do that.”

The question of data ownership becomes even sharper for winemakers. A producer can find themselves rated by thousands of users without having been consulted, with no access to those aggregated ratings, and with no lever to influence their score — other than persuading their buyers to download the app and leave a good review. On wineandtech.fr, we’ve already explored how blockchain can give traceability and power back to producers — participatory rating poses a symmetrical but opposite problem: here it’s the consumption data that slips away from those who make the wine.

“If a wine drops below 4 stars on Vivino, people no longer give it a chance. It doesn’t matter what your reference guide or your wine merchant says.”
A French importer, in Bordeaux trade circles

THE CROWD VERSUS THE EXPERT: A BATTLE REDRAWING AUTHORITY IN THE WINE WORLD

Two hundred million ratings against five recognised palates

Traditional wine criticism rests on an aristocratic model: a handful of palates trained over decades define what deserves to be drunk. Robert Parker, Wine Spectator, Jancis Robinson, Decanter — these institutions rate perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 wines a year. Vivino handles two million scans a day. The argument of scale is real. A Polish Riesling or an emerging English wine can rack up hundreds of ratings on Vivino before a specialist critic has ever gone near them.

© Unsplash — Professional tasting versus the verdict of the connected crowd.

But the system’s limits are just as real. A Vivino rating carries the same weight from the palate of a beginner who has only ever drunk sweet wines as from that of a seasoned enthusiast who has been tasting for twenty years. The algorithm favours immediately pleasing wines — round, accessible, generous with fruit — at the expense of wines built to age, often austere in their youth and revealing their greatness after ten years in the cellar. A Barolo or a Chablis premier cru will be mechanically penalised if opened too early. It’s a structural bias that the crowd, by its very nature, cannot correct.

VIVINO, CELLARTRACKER, WINE-SEARCHER: THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF DATA, THREE VISIONS OF WINE

The ecosystem of challengers

© Unsplash — Managing your cellar also means choosing who to entrust your data to.

CellarTracker, founded in 2003, is built on a radically different philosophy. Detailed technical notes, contributions from serious collectors, vintage sheets documented over decades — it’s the Wikipedia of wine, deep rather than broad. Its quasi-collaborative model keeps the data accessible to the community without monetising it in the same way. Wine-Searcher plays yet another tune: a global price engine, it covers nine million wines and their availability at thousands of merchants. The data here isn’t affective, it’s transactional.

Delectable, bought by critic Antonio Galloni’s Vinous group, bets on the quality of its notes rather than their quantity, with a community of recognised sommeliers and critics. In France, apps such as Wine Advisor (E.Leclerc) or Raisin (a natural-wine specialist) seek their niches from angles Vivino doesn’t cover. Each of these players aspires to become the infrastructure layer of the wine decision — but none yet has Vivino’s critical mass.

The advantage is self-reinforcing: the more users, the more precise the database; the more precise the database, the more users it attracts. It’s what platform economists call a data moat — a near-impassable moat of data. With 2 million daily scans, Vivino is fifty times bigger than its nearest competitor in this segment, according to Zachariassen himself.

THE ARTIFICIAL SOMMELIER WON’T REPLACE THE WINEMAKER — BUT IT HAS ALREADY CHANGED THE BUYER

AI moves into the cellar

Vivino recently launched its AI Sommelier — a conversational assistant that knows your scan history, your ratings, your preferences, and answers questions in natural language. It knows you’ve liked three Burgundy Pinot Noirs and that a heavily dosed Champagne doesn’t win you over. On the iPhone 16, integration with Apple Visual Intelligence even lets you scan a label directly via the Camera Control button, without opening the app — with Vivino’s data working in the background.

© Unsplash — The AI sommelier: your palate digitised, in the service of a proprietary algorithm.

This shift isn’t neutral. It means that the wine data you produce — your tastes, your purchases, your personal palate — is now a commercial asset of the first importance, refined in real time by artificial intelligence. In our article on drones and AI in viticulture, we explored how technology is transforming the production side of wine; Vivino is carrying out the same transformation on the consumption side, with the same instrument — data — but in very different hands.

Vivino has undeniably democratised access to information about wine. It has given a voice to millions of enthusiasts who didn’t have one, shone a light on regions ignored by the specialist press, and made choosing a bottle less intimidating. But by consolidating that information into a proprietary architecture, it has also centralised a power that was once diffuse: the power to decide what deserves to be drunk — and what doesn’t.

Do you use Vivino or another app to choose your wines? Do you still trust your own palate — or have you delegated that decision to your phone? Share your experience in the comments.

Sources: Wikipedia — Vivino · A+ Singapore — Interview with Heini Zachariassen (2024) · Locals Insider — Vivino App Review (2026) · The Drinks Business — Vivino and the future of wine retail · InVintory — Best Wine Apps 2026 · Petit Vin Entre Copains — Wine-rating apps compared · SommelierX — Alternatives to Vivino (2026)

September 10, 2026
The AI Sommelier: Can You Recommend the Right Wine Without a Palate?

⏱️ Reading time: 7 minutes

Thirty percent of French people say they have already consulted an artificial intelligence to choose a wine or a spirit. Among 18-to-25-year-olds, the figure climbs to 58%. That number, drawn from the latest SOWINE/Dynata barometer, marks a turning point: for the first time, the machine has officially invited itself into the French drinker’s purchase journey. We ask it for a pairing for tonight’s dinner, an opinion on a bottle received as a gift, an idea for breaking out of our habits. And it answers — quickly, politely, with disarming self-assurance.

One question, however, hangs in the air — one the surrounding enthusiasm carefully avoids: what, exactly, is that recommendation based on? When a sommelier advises you on a wine, they draw on years of tastings, of aromas, of memory. The AI, for its part, has never tasted anything. Can you really recommend the right wine without a palate?

THREE WAYS TO ADVISE ON A WINE WITHOUT HAVING DRUNK A DROP

Behind the “AI sommelier,” three engines

The most widespread recommendation engine doesn’t analyse the wine: it analyses the drinkers. This is collaborative filtering — Vivino’s method, borrowed from Netflix and Amazon. Its principle fits in a single sentence: people who liked the same wines as you also liked this one. The suggestion is born of a statistical correlation between millions of ratings, not of any understanding of the liquid. Effective at guessing what will please you, blind to what is actually in the glass.

A second family reasons about the wine itself — or rather about its technical sheet. Apps such as WineRing or the iAlacarte sommelier match an aromatic profile (tannic structure, acidity, residual sugar, intensity) against that of a dish (cooking method, sauce, garnish). It’s the classic logic of food-and-wine pairing, encoded in a database. Finer than collaborative filtering, it still depends on descriptors entered, upstream, by humans.

The third family, the most recent and the most spectacular, rests on large language models. Queried in natural language — “I’ve got a duck breast with cherries and three bottles in my cellar, what would you suggest?” — the model produces a reasoned, often startling answer. But all it does is reassemble, on the fly, what thousands of tasters have written on the web. It compiles; it does not experiment.

These three approaches share one blind spot. None of them tastes. They predict from proxies — co-occurrences of ratings, sheets of descriptors, scraped text. Wine, as a sensory object, remains strictly inaccessible to them. And that is precisely where the science of the palate becomes illuminating.

THE PALATE ISN’T IN THE MOUTH — IT’S IN THE BRAIN

What brain imaging reveals about the sommelier

In 2005, a team published in NeuroImage the first functional magnetic resonance imaging study devoted to sommeliers. Seven experts, seven novices, the same wine. The result: in the experts, tasting activates a particular network — the left insula and the orbitofrontal cortex, two regions dedicated to integrating taste and smell. The researchers’ conclusion is counter-intuitive: that difference reflects not finer taste buds, but a learned ability to connect sensations to memory.

The studies that followed confirm and refine this. In 2014, a Besançon team (Pazart et al.) showed that the expert reacts more immediately and more “economically” than the novice, drawing heavily on memory structures — the hippocampus, the temporal pole. Where the beginner gropes through diffuse associative areas, the professional evaluates the wine and recognises its type in a single movement. In 2016, a study of Master Sommeliers observed a reinforced memory network; in 2024, researchers at the Basque Center on Cognition measured, in sommeliers, more intact white matter in the tracts linking perception, memory and language. Training, quite literally, reshapes the brain.

Taste isn’t on the plate; it is built inside our heads.
Gabriel Lepousez, neurobiologist at the Institut Pasteur

For this specialist in sensory perception, tasting is an operation of formidable complexity: the brain must rank information arriving through the eyes, through the nose (directly and by retronasal olfaction), through the mouth and through touch, synthesise it, compare it against memory, then translate it into words. One detail illuminates all the rest: sight alone occupies 15 to 17% of the cortex, against barely 1% for smell. Faced with uncertainty between an odour and a colour, the brain almost always rules in favour of what it sees.

The human expert, fallible by design

This primacy of the brain has a flip side: it makes perception manipulable. The most famous experiment is that of Frédéric Brochet, Gil Morrot and Denis Dubourdieu, conducted in Bordeaux in 2001. Fifty-four oenology students were given a white wine to taste, then the same white wine dyed red with a neutral colourant. The verdict: the students described the second using the vocabulary of red wines — black fruit, tannins — as if the colour had rewritten their sense of smell.

A second experiment by the same researcher is just as cruel: a single Bordeaux, presented two weeks apart under the label “table wine” and then “grand cru,” drew radically opposite judgements. In other words, even the most seasoned taster remains subject to expectation, context and price. Their strength — a brain that integrates everything — is also their weakness.

SOMMELLERIE: AUGMENTED OR REPLACED?

What the machine gets right — genuinely

Against this backdrop, the AI has real strengths it would be dishonest to brush aside. First, it democratises: a sommelier’s advice is expensive and intimidating; an assistant available around the clock, free in its basic versions, lifts that barrier. Next, on everyday food-and-wine pairing, reasoning by aromatic profile is solid — it applies, without faltering, principles the average drinker doesn’t know. Finally, in a twist of irony, the AI escapes Brochet’s traps: neither colour, nor label, nor price throws off a machine that sees nothing. But that is precisely because it perceives nothing at all.

What it will not do

For that is where its competence ends. The AI will not taste the bottle opened in front of you: it cannot tell you that it’s corked, that it cooked in a car boot over the summer, that it’s going through a dumb phase. It reasons about an abstract, average, statistical wine — never about the real wine in the glass. It doesn’t read the table, doesn’t sense that a guest would rather avoid red or that the mood calls instead for something sparkling. And when it promises to choose a wine “to match your mood,” that is where it is most helpless: pairing to a dish can be encoded; pairing to a state of mind remains, for now, pure marketing.

A librarian, not a taster

Perhaps we’re simply reaching for the wrong metaphor. The AI sommelier is not a sommelier: it is a librarian of wine, prodigious at retrieving, cross-referencing and serving up information scattered across millions of bottles and reviews. On that ground — “what is a Crozes-Hermitage?”, “is this Pomerol any good?”, “which red with an osso buco?” — it renders a real and democratic service. But recommending the right wine remains, in an irreducible part, an act of embodied sensory memory that the machine cannot perform. The SOWINE barometer puts it in its own way: AI enters the picture not as a substitute, but as a new tool for guidance. The palate, meanwhile, stays between the two ears.

Would you trust an AI to choose the wine for your next dinner — or do you keep the final word? Tell us in the comments, and find our by-the-glass tastings on Instagram @wineandtech.

Sources: SOWINE/Dynata Barometer 2026 · Castriota-Scanderbeg et al., NeuroImage, 2005 · Pazart et al., Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2014 · Banks et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2016 · Basque Center on Cognition, Human Brain Mapping, 2024 · Morrot, Brochet & Dubourdieu, “The Color of Odors,” Brain and Language, 2001 · Gabriel Lepousez, Institut Pasteur (interviews in Le Figaro and Le Rouge & Le Blanc).

September 5, 2026