Mendoza may be a sleepy agricultural region by the quiet foothills of the Andes, but it is now also home to the world’s first open source winery. OpenVino at Costaflores Organic Vineyard in Lujan de Cuyo is the brainchild of US expat and IT expert Mike Barrow, and as of 6 May 2018 he’s opening up all his books for the world to see and launching his entire 2018 wine production as a wine-backed crypto asset.
What is an open source winery?
Open source is usually used in software when the source code is made available for use or modification by the public. In the case of the winery, it means everything is available for the public to see. And that doesn’t just mean his accounting will be visible to the world, but you can also track the temperature of the fermentation tank or the temperature underground in the vineyard; you’ll be able to see how much the vines have been irrigated and what treatments the vineyard workers have used, in what quantity and when, throughout the year; there’s a weather cam outside and there’s an indoor camera inside showing you exactly what’s going on in the winery at all times. Every piece of data and information collected about the production of the wine is visible for everyone to see at any moment – entirely open source.
“I know lots of wineries that have interesting blogs about their viticulture, but I know of none that open their books, their accounting ledger, for all to see,” Mike explains of the pioneering project. “If we are going to talk about organic viticulture, or fair-trade…this is the real deal. And we are using new low-cost technologies to bring the Internet-of-things to the vines.”
Mike explains the concept of an open source winery here in this video:
What is a wine-backed crypto asset?
The other novel component of OpenVino is that the entirety of the 2018 vintage will be sold as a wine-backed crypto asset, another first in the wine industry. Each bottle of wine made will represent one token – an MTB coin. The cost of that token is going to be set at the cost price (which will be approximately 100 Argentine pesos before tax, estimates Mike) and the entire production will be sold as coins on 6th May in their ICO sale.
The fun part is that now all these tokens go onto an exchange. The price of the token, or wine bottles, are now free to market fluctuations and – as Mike puts it – the new owners of the tokens are able to ‘pocket the difference’ by selling the tokens at any point, or can exchange them for their bottle of wine when the 2018 vintage is released in 2021.
Mike’s goal is to ‘qualify value and honesty in wine’ rather than drive the price up through its tokenisation, and having his wine bottles on an openly visible exchange is part of the intrigue for him: “Some day, I want to be able answer questions like: ‘Where did the bottles that left the winery end up? What did the people that drank them feel and think? What foods and friendships…or sad moments did they share with those bottles?’ When someone asks me the price of my wine, I want to be able to say, ‘I don’t know…let’s look up the value online’, and have logic and reasoning behind that answer.”
He explains more in this video:
What’s the point of the project?
‘Cypto asset’ and ‘open source’ might feel like buzz words inappropriately inserted into the traditional idioms of wine, but what excites me about the OpenVino project is that it offers some much-needed transparency in an industry that is often obscured by smoke and marketing heists.
Of course, this strategy of making an open source winery is perhaps only possible for a small to medium-sized producer. But what OpenVino should, or hopes to, do, is make every single step of the wine production – from the vine to the bottle – visible to the consumer, and in doing so it will make the industry more accountable to the truth and transparency:
“When I try to communicate my passion for my product, explaining them what our vineyard is like, how organic viticulture works, how our wines are made…,” says Mike, “I want a mechanism in place so that the people I am talking to, know for certain that I am not bullshitting them.”
OpenVino goes live with the open source winery data available from May onwards and the ICO sale of MTB tokens starts on 6th May.
4 comments
Great concept that should be adopted by governments world wide. Good luck.
Thanks for your thoughts Manuel. It will be interesting to see how the transparency movement develops in governments too – hopefully sooner rather than later 🙂
Thank you Amanda, as a small winemaker myself I look forward to dive into it and gain useful insights to continue producing.
That’s great Lucio, I’m sure some of the data will be interesting for other winemakers. Cheers!