The French are coming. Again.  It has just been announced that plans are afoot by the French  to buy up land in the U.K. .  Taittinger and other big boys and girls have been producing sparkling white wine for some years in the U.K. after seeing Cornish pioneer Camel Valley vineyards successfully riding the early wine wave.  But now with climate change helping grapes to ripen more the French are planning on making red wine. And of course Brits like  Trevibban Mill near Padstow are already at it too. Pinot Noir is by now the second most planted red variety in the UK.  There is a storm coming.  Who is going to help small start-up wine-makers compete with the big players? The answer is Bluefruit , not a new grape variety but they are to be found in Cornwall.  Let’s back up.

Making high quality wine is a very personal matter. The French pioneered the garagiste movement (small quantities of wine of a very unique and sometimes high quality) but Californians took it to another level.  Doing it in larger volumes becomes tricky though.  You can employ people but the quality suffers; after all, nobody loves their baby as much as the parents. The winemaker can track  a handful of wine vats but if they want to keep quality but increase volume they have a problem.  Who is going to wake up at 4am during fermentation with a feeling in their gut that all is not well with the babies?
 Just how does the garagiste wine-maker keep track of 25 vats of fermenting grape-juice day and night? When to stir and oxygenate the must, if the fermentation starts to slow? When to adjust the temperature if it starts to rise?  And after fermentation, how to identify  reduction where the vat starts to smell of sulfur?

If they don’t catch the problem,  a year’s work is lost. Where on earth is the crazy winemaker going to find someone as nuts as they are? Well Cornwall based Bluefruit ’s band of beach boy beards  and boffins are coming at the problem sideways (Oh yes, we said it!) .

Indie film hit about wine. “Sideways” 2004. (cf. Beards)

“We are slightly nuts but in a good way” is how Bluefruit software engineer and champion bearded surf kayaker, Denzil puts it. “We have a track record in aerospace, medical and industrial fields. Wine is a good fit”.  They are developing custom built embedded software to manage  gas sensors (Co2, o2, H2SO4), automated flow valves, cooling units and pumps, giving continuous real-time data readouts.  In the past the wine-maker was pretty much chained to their vats night and day. Now they can monitor the vats remotely and intervene manually or automatically. This means they can increase production without having to hire extra help and without compromising their personal garage style wines. As founder and award winning entrepreneur Paul Massey  explains, “Our Agile approach with small teams and continuous feedback during development suits the garagiste spirit”. In fact there was an unexpected benefit of  Bluefruit’s embedded software: “all the data for the previous year gets  logged meaning our clients can play with  the inputs and  actually improve  their next vintage.” Climate willing, of course.  So as the big swells of garage wine-making form up, Bluefruit Software developers and their wave-riding beards will be helping new wave Brit wine-makers seriously get into those barrels.

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