00:00Europe's best food safety experts are joining forces to crack down on fraud.
00:06Euronews is following them in this special series called The Food Detectives.
00:10In this episode, the team committed to complete clarity in wine.
00:23It's autumn in the Douro Valley in Portugal and there's something special about the harvest this year.
00:28These vineyards are at the heart of an effort to bring total traceability to winemaking
00:34and it begins with measuring the production of each plant.
00:38Food detective Antonio Graça explains why it's so important.
00:42Vineyards are not homogeneous units, okay?
00:45There are micro variations in microclimates, in soil, even the plants are individual.
00:51So it is important for us to understand how each grapevine is actually leaving.
01:00Measuring production vine by vine is new here and to make it possible,
01:04these food detectives from the EU's Watson Project have developed two devices.
01:09One is a smart secateur and the other is a connected bucket, both robust enough for everyday use.
01:15They allow the winemakers to record exactly where and when the grapes were picked.
01:19The goal is, during the vineyard, during the process of normal,
01:24we can measure all the cuts that he makes with the cutter
01:27and synchronize the cut with the disposal of the vineyards in the garden,
01:32which has a plate that allows to measure the weight and the weight of the vineyards result in the vineyards.
01:38The garden is also located by GPS,
01:42or it allows us to measure the location of where the cut and the disposal happened in the vineyard.
01:48The motivation for such precision is clear,
01:52to shed light on exactly how the grapes develop different qualities and why.
01:57It's really a detective work because we have to look at all the leads that nature gives us.
02:03We have to understand the soil, we have to understand climate,
02:07the amount of sun, rain, winds, solar radiation,
02:12that is actually what makes the plant work and produce what we want.
02:19Once the grapes are harvested from these vines and loaded onto the tractor,
02:23they're tracked en route to the cellars.
02:26And here, the information flow continues.
02:28The moment they come into the reception tank,
02:32they are assigned a code to that volume of grapes,
02:37from which we know all the individual grape vines that contributed for that reception tank volume.
02:44One of the key challenges is managing large amounts of information securely.
02:48So these food detectives are testing blockchain technology
02:51to record which vines grapes went into each bottle.
02:54All this information that is collected, the objective is that it contributes to the knowledge
03:00and guarantees the rasterability.
03:02But we also need to keep the information in a way that is reliable and unviolable.
03:08And then blockchain comes out and gives us this mechanism.
03:12Alongside blockchain, another emerging technology is slowly making its way into winemaking.
03:18This autonomous robot knows these vines well
03:21and is being tested as a tool to cut grass, prune the plants and spray.
03:26O robot que temos aqui é capaz de navegar nestas vinhas,
03:28que têm declínbios acentuados, como podem ver aqui,
03:31e navegar de uma forma segura, sem cair,
03:34e navegar totalmente autónomo e em segurança,
03:37quer para a vinha, quer para os humanos, quer para os animais.
03:43Robots in the vines offer the chance to gather even more data
03:46about how the plants are progressing.
03:48E se temos um robot que navega nestas vinhas autonomamente e frequentemente,
03:53nós conseguiremos dizer a história de cada uva que existe na vinha.
03:58Conseguiremos perceber em que estado a temperatura esteve,
04:01que humildade esteve exposta,
04:04e que tipo de tratamentos e de fertilização levou essa uva.
04:08O último objetivo deste team é a produzir wine
04:13que can trace its journey from the bottle
04:15all the way back to specific grapes
04:17harvested on a precise day on a particular patch of hillside.
04:22For winemakers, such traceability
04:24means a chance to better capture the character of each harvest.
04:29We can work better at generating quality,
04:33generating identity from the earth,
04:36from the plants, from the places,
04:39and then transfer those identity and quality
04:43into the product,
04:44into the wine that the consumer will enjoy.
04:47That's all for this episode.
04:49Next time on The Food Detectives,
04:51cracking down on counterfeit olive oil in Italy.
04:54See you then.
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