6 innovative wine auxiliary companies have been named winners for the crowd-writing contest of WICA – the Wine Innovation Collaboration Alliance of EPAWI, the European Partnership for the Auxiliary Wine Industry project.

WICA’s crowd-writing contest «The Wine Industry of Tomorrow» included 9 different scenarios, with fictional characters but real stories, under 3 main themes: Grape-growing, Winemaking, and Management and Marketing. Supplier companies in the wine sector were called to respond by completing these challenging scenarios and integrating their innovative solutions. 36 companies participated by responding to one or more challenges, which resulted in a total of 57 stories.

A lot of expertise was demonstrated, various innovative solutions were presented and, ultimately, the winners can now be revealed:

• to minimize the challenges in grape-growing, UV Boosting (equipment for plants’ natural defenses stimulation using UV light) andPulverizadores Fede S.L.U (air blast sprayer, trailed mist blower and agronomic management digital solutions for specialty crops) were the companies that presented the most adequate technologies to the story beginnings;
• regarding winemaking, HTS (automatic yeast nutrition management system) and Winegrid (remote and real time winemaking monitoring solution) were the winners;
• and to improve the work in management & sales/marketing, ATT (turnkey unit traceability solutions)  and Ertus (Process2Wine, winery and wine management software) raised the bar quite high.

The crowd-writing contest was based on the results achieved in a survey created to identify the most urgent needs and challenges of winemakers, regarding the future of the wine-growing ecosystem. This was the first big step of the EPAWI project, resulting in over 60 interviews and more than 700 answers.

The winners are invited to, and reimbursed for, ecosystem studies in 2 of the 4 partner companies organized by the partner clusters, to get to know the industry organization, structure and actors. This is the type of action that WICA will continue to support. The project will be present at the industry’s main trade shows: SIMEI, VINITECH-SIFEL and ENOMAQ and are happy to talk about the project, the winners and other participants.

*The project:

WICA, the Wine Innovation Collaboration Alliance of the EPAWI project, the European Partnership for Auxiliary Wine Industry Innovation, has as its main objective to create a resilient wine value chain in the transition to industry 4.0, promoting the strategy “European tech solutions for the wine industry”.