Artificial intelligence searches for vineyard land from space with the Italian startup Terroir from Space

The wine of the future is also produced with satellites and artificial intelligence:Terroir from Space uses technologies to help winemakers.

• To combat climate change, wine producers are adopting advanced technologies, considering original varieties and seeking new terrains.
• The Italian startup Terroir from Space helps them with the use of satellite data and artificial intelligence in order to identify new sites for vineyards, predicting the climate trends of the future.
• The combination of space technology and winemaking tradition offers new ways of tackling global warming without giving up the industry's leading products.

Among the complications to deal with caused by climate changes there is one that also concerns i wines.Global warming is taking its toll vineyards all over the world are put to the test, in particular the European areas where the historical varieties loved by enthusiasts are produced.The rising temperatures and extreme weather events they threaten the existence of the most valuable and widespread wines.Technology comes to the aid of wine producers. Thanks to an Italian idea, carried out by the startup Terroir from Space, artificial intelligence algorithms and satellite data are used to project future climate trends, providing valuable information to manufacturers.

How Terroir from Space works

Terroir from Space is part of the ecosystem LifeGate Way and was born from an idea of Alessandro Saetta, Paul Kimon Weissenberg and Manuel Poejo Torres, friends who share a love for wine and science.The Italian Saetta, after studying aerospace engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan, he had the intuition to apply the latest technologies available to wine products.Together with the co-founders and thanks to the support of Copernicus program of the European Space Agency, developed an algorithm that compares current and historical satellite imagery, weather records, and hydrometry to project climate trends into the future.

“Starting directly from identifying the right terrain, we use ours engine with artificial intelligence – equipped with access to weather patterns optimal historical data and with customizable parcel properties (sun and wind exposure, minerality of the coasts, etc.) – to guarantee the best possible correspondence between the optimal soil and the desired grape varieties, ensuring stable and high-quality products over the years,” explain the founders.

Confident that their model could help winemakers discover a new viticultural landscape in a dynamic and changing climate, Saetta and his colleagues joined the Porto Protocol, an international group of wineries sharing information and supporting action to combat climate change.“Satellite data contains an incredible amount of information,” Weissenberg explained."We can determine the composition of the soil up to half a meter deep, the amount of sunlight illuminating a site and severe weather events to help us project short- and medium-term trends.”

From wines to other crops

The field tests have already borne fruit and Terroir from Space has been able to help Italian and Portuguese winemakers in finding the most suitable soils.“Our model predicted that there would have been less rain in the area but more intense storms, so the site he was examining was too steep a slope and vulnerable to erosion,” Lightning said referring to a producer who contacted them from Portugal.Terroir from Space can help wineries innovate with new pairings, helping to link grape varieties to particular vineyard sites;as global warming challenges us to rethink our preconceptions about where wine can be grown and what it should taste like, part of this new perspective could come from space.

As for the future, the founders explain that their solution encompasses a variety of players and it is not limited to a particular type of crop.“In the long term, we aim to involve more actors along the entire supply chain (from cultivation to retail).We also plan to apply our AI model to other crops that depend on specific growing conditions and are affected by climate change such as coffee, cocoa, tobacco and fruit trees“, they explain.Their invention aims to minimize climate-induced risks and optimize the geographical location of agricultural production, to ensure that producers and consumers do not have to give up a glass of their favorite wine.