Gadgetory

this is the fermentation dome fermentation dome it looks more like a supervillains lair it's 18 stories underground built into the side of a mountain and controlled by a supercomputer named Felix but instead of world domination the purpose of this place is to make wine you've essentially taken the process of winemaking and instead of having it be all on one floor like most wineries we've brought it in vertically inside a dome so each level is a different moment in the winemaking very top is grape sorting that drops down a hatch into fermentation that's what all of this projection is showing us at the Felix system that my brother created and then from there we go down to press down to tanks into barrels and eventually we'll go down even further down below us to filtration Florencia and her brother Christian Paul Maas oversee their families super smart vineyard and winery in California's Napa Valley it's so massive it took seven years to excavate and build since the complex was completed in 2007 the team has been building technology into the age-old process of winemaking they built a computer named Hal and replaced it two years ago with Felix outside a system called vigor attracts the vineyards helped by analyzing aerial imagery we take this little Cessna aircraft with a very specialized multispectral camera on its belly and we fly every Monday and Thursday so we take pictures of the vineyard and in we use certain forms of infrared light which helps us understand how vigorous the plants are when harvest season really kicks off in late September this is where the action is sensors in the tanks measure temperature sugar and alcohol levels winemakers use that data to decide how they want to tweak the wine as it passes through the critical fermentation process from the tanks the wine is barreled and aged and eventually blended and bottled periodically florenzi and Christian sit down with their winemakers to check on how each wine is progressing oh my god seems gonna be so much fun to blend away with a few taps they pull up data on the wine in their glasses this is the lower 6 16 16 see they can tell me everything from which parcel of land the grapes are grown on to how much water and Sun they got and of course a near minute-to-minute accounting of the Felix assisted fermentation process we are trying to focus in on the details of the craft because the basics have been tried and tested for in a hundreds of years so we are working every year on a refinement and at this point with sophistication of technology and other industries know that refinement is getting into some smart technology we're mixing smart tech and winemaking result in the perfect blend we'll find out next year when the first vintage produced with the help of Felix is released you