Excessive Labor Costs for Fermentation Monitoring

$5,000-$15,000 annual labor cost inflation per fermentation cycle due to manual monitoring • Labor tied up in manual monitoring and data entry for fermentation ranges from an extra 1–3 FTEs during harvest at mid-sized wineries, often equating to $5,000–$20,000+ per month in incremental wages, overtime, and temporary staff. Automation vendors report direct savings in human resources and recurring monitoring costs once real-time sensor systems are adopted, by eliminating most sampling runs and manual logging.

Cellar and lab teams walk the cellar to pull manual samples from each tank, run lab tests on benchtop instruments, then record density/Brix, temperature, and pH in paper notebooks or whiteboards and later retype them into Excel or a basic cellar management system, often sharing updates via email, text, or WhatsApp. • Manual tank visits, sampling, lab analysis, and spreadsheet data entry