As a winemaker, you’re a master chemist– even if your customers don’t know it.
You leverage lifetimes of experience and expert intuition to annually produce one of the most dynamic and complex amalgamations of chemistry ever created for human consumption: wine.
With a nice label, a good story, and enough money, most consumers can be convinced to buy something once. But in order to get recurring sales, the consumer needs to love what’s in the bottle.
While technological advances offer insight into chemistry markers– such as pH, TA, SO2, VA, RS, etc.– for quality control to avoid failed productions. But these are far too general to differentiate between the infinite potential flavor profiles of wine.
On the other hand, there are countless compounds that go undetected by routine analysis. These compounds, such as phenols, esters, aldehydes, higher alcohols, etc., distinguish the complex taste, aroma, texture, and color, or what we at Tastry call the “flavor” of the wine. Tastry provides visibility into these compounds and their effects on flavor.
Understanding these complexities hasn’t been a mainstream focus in the wine industry for three primary reasons. First is cost, at a typical commercial lab, it could cost thousands of dollars per sample; second is relevance, the raw data isn’t helpful unless you understand how the various compounds interact to express flavor; and, third is application, knowing the flavor isn’t helpful if you can’t identify who will like which flavors.
The initial goal of Tastry was to solve these problems, and it was accomplished with five innovations.
- A unique analytical chemistry methodology. The equipment we use is state-of-the-art, but we didn’t create it. It can be found at the highest quality labs in the world. Our innovation is in our method, i.e., the way we use it. We don’t have chemistry “panels.”Our goal is to look at everything all at once. Using our method, we pull more than one million data points from every sample we analyze. A great side effect is that we provide a tremendous amount of quantified chemistry data to our clients at no additional cost.
- The ability to “decode the flavor matrix” of the wine. We feed those one million+ chemistry data points into TastryAI which evaluates the ratios between compounds, and groups of compounds, to decipher the flavor of the wine– what we call the Differentiated Flavor Profile, or “DFP”.
- The ability to “decode the palate matrix” of consumers. Through a consumer-facing application, we collect, track, and predict the individual consumer palates of 335 million Americans– what we call their Differentiated Palate Profile, or “DPP”.
- The ability to predict which wines an individual is going to like before they try them. We do this by associating the DFPs of products to the DPPs of consumers. Many of our clients think of Tastry as a permanently empaneled focus group of every consumer in the United States.
- The ability to provide the winemaker tools to quickly and inexpensively explore what-if scenarios. Our computational blending method, called CompuBlend, allows the winemaker to evaluate who will like a wine before they even blend it. Not only that, this tool allows winemakers to explore new avenues, answering questions like, “if I did this or that, what would happen to the flavor of my wine?”
Why might all of this be important to you?
Well, our focus is to help you sell more wine. Generally, that comes in three forms, we help you:
- Quickly identify and market to the consumers that will love your wine
- Mitigate events that may be out of your control
- Explore options that might help you reach your intended vision for your wine, less expensively
Here’s how easy it is for you to use Tastry:
Comprehensive Sample Analysis
Send one or more samples to the Tastry lab, and many of the compound quantifications will be available for review and comparison, which allows you to record and track the progression of your wines year-over-year.
Your comprehensive chemistry record will be an invaluable resource when bringing new winemakers up to speed and evaluating the effects of everything from vineyard practices and winemaking techniques to climate change and environmental events.
Predict Market Performance
You can use TastryAI to realize the complex interaction of compounds and the ratios between them to better understand and identify which consumers are likely to love your wine.
TastryAI can provide those insights on an individual level by identifying which members of your wine club are likely to appreciate which wines the most, or by aggregating the palate preferences of consumers across the U.S. to show retailers what percentage of consumers will love your wine in a local restaurant, regional grocery, or national e-commerce; and, TastryAI can further show how your wine will perform compared to others of similar style, region, varietal, price point, etc.
Tastry is a great tool for wineries trying to grow their business. Whether helping the winery to grow club membership by recommending your wines to consumers we know will love them, or by helping you expose your wine to retailers, who might otherwise might be skeptical. Tastry can show that your wine will be a great experience for a meaningful percentage of consumers.
When combined, TastryAI’s comprehensive chemical analysis of your wine, resulting flavor profile, and consumer palate preference insight, can help you expand the universe of oenophiles that will enjoy your vision as a winemaker.
Mitigate and Explore
Tastry gives you the tools to mitigate unforeseen events that may be out of your control, by helping you to explore solutions quickly, more efficiently, and less expensively. Maybe the fruit experienced a smoke event, and you need to explore the effects of filtration, reverse osmosis, enzyme or ozone treatments, or amelioration strategies through the application of oak or blending.
…Or maybe you need to increase production requiring different fruit, TastryAI can help you evaluate thousands of samples.
…Or maybe you need to move from barrel to tank while maintaining the same oak profile, Tastry can help you narrow down the best combination of dominos.
…Or maybe you are looking to create a new wine with a given target profile, or just explore the possibilities of the fruit you have.
Whatever the goal, Tastry can help you explore a couple of potential solutions, or millions, in just hours.
TastryAI is a tool designed to save you time and money, so you can focus on what’s important, your vision for your wine.
…and it’s simple to get started. Just send in some samples.