La Trobe University has developed a smoke sensor to track smoke events around vineyards and advise winegrowers whether it is likely to taint their grape. Australian agtech provider, Goanna Ag, has signed on to commercialise the Wine Industry Smoke Detectors (WISDs) – colloquially known as ‘wizards’.
With the potential to save hundreds of millions of dollars in lost wine production, La Trobe University’s latest project is in the process of being rolled out across the wine industry, with monitors now being used to track the impact of bushfires that have ravaged the Grampians.
Data taken during trials of the sensor through the 2020 bushfires that devastated wine regions across Australia’s east coast found that $100-$150 million worth of grapes were needlessly discarded over unfounded concerns they were tainted by smoke.
The WISDs, developed by a team led by Professor Ian Porter at the School of Agriculture, Biomedicine and Environment at La Trobe over the past decade, are able to tell producers if they need to discard their season’s harvest, or use winemaking techniques to remove the taint.
Trials of their sensor in vineyards across south-eastern Australia revealed smoke did not taint wine grapes as much as viticulturalists believed. Over the next two years, the hardware and algorithm will be further validated in real-world fire events and the network of WISDs will be expanded to other wine regions across Australia.
“Growers think that all smoke causes smoke taint, but data collected by our team has for the first time globally linked the amount of fresh smoke needed in vineyards to smoke taint in the bottle. This has been the Holy Grail of research that’s now being solved,” said Porter.
“This sensor has the potential to save a heap of grapes that would usually be thrown away, which can be financially and emotionally devastating for winegrowers. It’s one of the reasons we developed the WISDs.”
The findings also showed that in the majority of cases, winegrowers need not be concerned that smoke from planned controlled burns to reduce fire risk might taint their grapes.
“The WISD is an amazing breakthrough for Australian growers and wine producers. It provides the sector with an extremely valuable tool to use during any smoke event to determine whether there is a problem or not.”
The prototype smoke loggers have been developed by La Trobe University researchers and supported with funding from Wine Australia, La Trobe University and other partners, including the Victorian and Australian governments and regional wine associations.
A network of 100 prototype loggers was deployed in vineyards in north-east Victoria after the catastrophic bushfires in 2020, with the technology refined in the years that followed.
Operating like the networks that continuously monitor air quality for human health, the data loggers calculate risk ratings for smoke taint drawn from a vast database of smoke, grapes and wine data collected by La Trobe during more than 70 controlled burns and eight major bushfires.
This knowledge links smoke dose to smoke composition, phenol levels in grapes and wine and their sensory outcomes in wines. It also incorporates the critical risk factors for smoke taint, including burn conditions, distance from the burn, grapevine variety and the timing of exposure during the season.
The smoke and other data collected by the WISDs, such as temperature and humidity, are transmitted to a central server that calculates a traffic light risk rating for smoke taint. The risk rating is communicated to vineyard managers in real time via a mobile phone app and can also be accessed via a dedicated website.
Goanna Ag winegrape business development lead, Jock Ferguson, said the company had a track record of working with proven science to help growers solve genuine, well-recognised challenges.
“We are particularly excited to be involved in the commercialisation of the WISDs. They are a vital industry breakthrough with appeal to stakeholders throughout the grape and wine sector in Australia as well as winegrowing regions around the world,” said Ferguson.
