Bodega Matarromera blends tradition and tech in search of winemaking excellence

Along the Duero basin in north-central Spain stretches one of the country’s most fruitful wine-producing areas. In every direction are many vineyards, but specifically, near the small town of Valbuena de Duero, is the marquee winery Matarromera, a family-run business that has an additional 11 distributed throughout the country in seven protected designations of origin (PDO).

Inside, during the busy harvest season, it’s easy to see how innovation and technology coexist. First, there’s an artificial vision system that works at an astonishing rate to separate grapes that aren’t suitable, in keeping with size and colour parameters, to make around 150,000 bottles of its highest range of wines. During a typical harvest day, around 20,000 kilos of fruit are processed. 

But according to GM Julio Pinto, investment in tech at the organization, founded in 1988 by agricultural engineer Carlos Moro, goes much further with its adoption of AI for all operational and business processes. In a sector as artisanal as winemaking, to have the best wines today, it’s necessary to have the best information, he says.

The wineries began a migration process to the cloud back in 2007 in collaboration with Microsoft, which, according to Pinto, required improving the entire network infrastructure in the area. After this project, which lasted several years, all applications run in the Microsoft Business Central environment and are accessible from anywhere in the world.

“This is producing significant cost and scalability savings, and not just at the ICT level,” he says. “For example, we’re automating processes such as management with administrations, which saves us a lot of manual effort. It’s been a huge leap.”

Now, the winery group uses AI for automation, analysis and, ultimately, to gain efficiency. It does so through Copilot for all the applications in its corporate environment, as well as in the construction of a secure, scalable, and fully customizable winery management platform called VinoTEC, which is specific to the industry and developed on Dynamics 365 Business Central. But there’s a limit to what it can accomplish. “AI will never be able to taste the wine,” says Pinto.

A new year for AI

In this work aimed at achieving a balance between innovation and technology, Matarromera has 13 patents and boasts a range of non-alcoholic wines that, thanks to investment in R&D, are improving year after year. Plus, it focuses on sustainability and reuses all its by-products to make other types of liqueurs, which are brought to market.

With all of this progress, technology is becoming a key ally, as explained by David Hernández, Madrid-based cloud solution architect at Microsoft, who says that digital tools not only optimize processes, but also open up new business opportunities through flexibility. He emphasizes the importance of the concept of platform and integration. “Our goal is to provide solutions and knowledge to these types of small- and medium-sized organizations, and it has a lot to do with change management,” he says.

Hernández also underlines the value of having industrial knowledge from 12,600 partners in Spain who support their clients’ projects. In this case, Tipsa, the consultancy specializing in the Microsoft ecosystem to address digital transformation tasks in corporate applications, has been the right hand of the wineries in creating VinoTEC. And Andrés Sáenz, Tipsa’s marketing and communication director, explains how gen AI bolsters four areas: finance, sales and operations, production and oenology, and marketing. “We trust in the data,” he says. “This has to be unique and univocal.”