Marco Simonit speaks at Vine to Mind
Harvard Data Science Review.
‘The reason we chose to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Harvard Data Science Review with a wine theme is that from my perspective, wine is extremely difficult to study from a scientific point of view because there are a tremendous amount of variations,’ said Xiao-li Meng, an avid wine lover and Harvard professor and founding editor-in-chief for the Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR).
‘Making wine involves science, technology, art, history and culture,’ added Meng.
The Harvard event was the brainchild of Meng and Don St Pierre of analytics firm AdaptEdge.
Harvard’s Xiao-li Meng at Vine to Mind. Credit: Tony Rinaldo Photography
HDSR is a highly regarded academic journal. Its mission is ‘to publish content that helps define and shape data science as a scientifically rigorous and globally impactful multidisciplinary field based on the principled and purposed production, processing, parsing, and analysis of data’.
This occasion saw luminaries in the wine world join top academics in data science, artificial intelligence (AI) and economics from America, Asia, Europe and Australia to tackle the challenges the world of wine is facing.
‘I wanted to get the wine industry together with data scientists and scholars to learn how data science can help the wine industry adapt to new climates, consumers and challenges. As a statistician and data scientist, I’m interested in problem-solving and learning new methodologies that may be completely unique to wine,’ said Meng.
Climate data and the future of wine
While data can’t solve the wine world’s climate change problems, it can help winegrowers and winemakers adapt more fluidly to rapidly changing environments.
Elizabeth Wolkovich, from the University of British Columbia, presented some fairly astonishing climate data in her presentation: The Problem of Terroir in the Anthropocene. Wolkovich argued that the notion of terroir is a combination of conditions, regional customs and culture, as well as environmental elements of soil, climate and regional biodiversity.
Saskia de Rothschild at Vine to Mind. Credit: Tony Rinaldo Photography.
Wolkovich’s assertion is that terroir is fluid and shifting. ‘Some things haven’t changed over the several millennia of human winemaking; the soils and geography have remained relatively steady over those thousands of years, but the climate has changed radically in the last 40 years.’
‘That means this concept, which was focused on a static idea, has changed. In the last 40 years, the terroir of Bordeaux is not the same terroir that it was, and it will be a completely different terroir in the next 20 years.’
Wolkovich showed climate data from the last 40 years, comparing classic regions with those on the US West Coast: ‘Europe has warmed in its summer growing season temperatures almost a full 20% in the last 4o years, which creates a dramatic change in the terroir.’
The Europeans are also leading the way with variety, diversity, and adaptations, according to Wolkovich.
Wolkovich’s conclusion was that variety adaptation and diversity were essential for the classic terroirs to continue producing the world’s wines. This means selecting varieties that ripen sufficiently and can do so while navigating the ‘climate hazards’ – things like frost, hail and wildfire season – which typically happens close to harvest or September in the northern hemisphere.
Professor Jing Cao at Vine to Mind. Credit: Tony Rinaldo Photography
Using data to crack the code of wine reviews
Jing Cao, a professor of statistics at Southern Methodist University, presented a study she had done using AI and machine learning (ML) to analyse the texts of wine reviews. Cao and her team of graduate students scraped 10 years of data from Wine Spectator magazine reviews because ‘wine review language is not an everyday language, it has its own kind of encryption,’ said Cao.
Cao’s…
Source : https://www.decanter.com/wine-news/harvard-data-science-review-uses-big-data-to-examine-wine-533006/
