Last December I wrote about technologists moving over to the wine-making business in an article titled For the Love of Technology and Wine. It seems I was ahead of my time. In the current edition (August 21, 2006) of Fortune Magazine, Kate Bonamici authored The Grapes of Math, the featured story in Fortune's Business Life section. Ms. Bonamici concludes that high-tech tools help make better wine.

Chuck McMinn, an ex-Intel chiphead, employs several high-tech gadgets at his Napa winery, Vineyard 29 - mositure probes to monitor water use, weather stations, sap flow sensors, microturbines to produce electricity, Tanknet software to regulate fermentation, a titrator to test chemical balances. McMinn has taken his ex-boss Andy Grove's advice from the chip days and is applying it to wine-making -

If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

Apparently HP's former CEO Lew Platt instilled the love of wine-making in his employees (Lew, recently deceased, left the top spot at HP to lead Kendall Jackson a few years ago). Former HP director of Internet Marketing and inventor of the term "Laser-Jet", Bill Murphy spends his days at his vineyard Clos LaChance near the Santa Cruz Mountains, applying his techical know-how to the art of growing grapes.

Ms. Bonamici reports that Acrolon Technologies, Inc's Tanknet software is now in use at over 80 vineyards. Tanknet is adding 20 to 30 new clients each year. I was rather surprised to find a software provider with such a niche focus - fermentation control. After a quick search of wine related software products (using my new found search engine - ask.com), I found over 40 companies offering winery software solutions on Wine Busienss Online in specialties from vineyard operations to wine production to sales.

Oh by the way, the career path of chiphead to winemaker seems to be rather popular. T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, has his own winery - Clos De La Tech. You gotta love the name! Unbelievably, people are snapping up his Pinot Noir at $101.50 per bottle. And one other thing - the bottle comes with a pair of chips, that's right, semiconductors with 107 million transistors on them embedded in sealing wax!

These techies have a lot of love for wine!

Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive