Australian wine producers face major long-term challenges associated with potentially dramatic shifts in the rural economy
and the grape-growing climate. These shifts can lead to increasingly rapid changes in operating circumstances, consumer
expectations and the productiveness of the natural environment. Interdependencies and feedbacks between these elements compound
the decision-making difficulties faced by producers and grower communities.
Investment options, sourcing strategies and future operating patterns need to be assessed over the long term
(i.e. on timescales comparable to the wine industry’s capital cycles), simultaneously accounting for viticultural, logistical
and financial concerns. At present there are few, if any, quantitative analysis tools that are useful to wine industry stakeholders
in this context. We see the creation of these tools for long-range wine futures analysis as difficult but achievable by a
multi-disciplinary research team, and we see the project to be ambitious yet important for the wine industry.
A new platform for infrastructure analysis and decision-making
We envisage a tool (or suite of tools), which we will refer to as the Grape Supply Analysis Platform (GSAP),
fulfilling the industry need for long-range futures analysis.
The vision is for GSAP to provide industry participants and policy-makers with valuable insight into the uncertainties and risks associated with futures that are substantially different to now, across all of our wine producing regions. GSAP has the potential to drive informed decision-making throughout the industry, particularly in relation to long-term investments in plantings, irrigation assets and processing facilities.
We intend for the platform to:
- Forecast changes in the productive capacity (yield, quality and style of production) of vineyards, new or existing, across Australia’s grape growing regions over time;
- Consider and propose optimised wine production infrastructure over a time horizon extending 15-30 years into the future;
- Address long-range transport analysis and decision-making, including the evaluation of infrastructure investment options and the evolution of flows and demand over time;
- Explore the possibilities of events and the logic of investments and grape-sourcing decisions, rather than only explore particular scenarios that are proposed by users;
- Be available for ongoing use by the organisations that support its development.
We anticipate that the platform will have an “open” architecture: i.e. there will be a full disclosure of the technical details of the platform to researchers, industry and government, who may improve and add components to the platform over time.
The methodological challenge
It will be useful, but not sufficient, for tools to be constructed that can assess investments, strategies and the impacts of exogenous changes (environmental, economic and social) according to a user-specified trajectory of decisions, events and trends into the future. However, there are far too many options, unknowns and possibilities for this approach alone to be successful.
We must seek new methodologies that thoroughly and intelligently handle the wide range of uncertainties, options and probabilities that are relevant to grape-growing and winemaking systems. For example, we do not want to embed arbitrarily particular extreme weather events and winery investments into the timeline of a certain scenario. Instead, we want to understand the possibilities of events and the logic of investments and sourcing decisions, and computationally generate insight and potential decisions in relation to multiple futures simultaneously.
The new probabilistic decision analysis methodologies will be a major advance in the decision sciences. Such methodologies are being actively sought by multiple parties in government and industry in a range of domains — infrastructure planning, water and energy, security, climate change and agricultural sustainability.
The viticultural challenge
There are viticultural modelling challenges that are the equal of the major conceptual and implementation challenges associated with developing the overarching analysis methodology. It is fundamental for quantitative tool developments that knowledgeable researchers devise models of vineyard performance under:
- The underlying shifts in the environment: altered meteorological patterns, water quantity and quality, soil condition, labour availability and so on. These shifts may be due primarily to climate change, but are also related to effects such as competition between sectors and changes in the rural economy.
- Acute vintage-specific circumstances in nutrient, water and other resource availability (e.g. due to drought), with the probability of adverse circumstances tending to increase as/if our climate becomes more extreme and variable.
- Extreme events, such as high winds, frosts, floods and heat spells, which as an overall set of disturbances can also be generally expected to increase in severity and frequency as/if our climate alters.
Vineyard performance in this context refers to:
- The intended-uses that can be fulfilled by a production off a vineyard (with a stated probability of success), in any year under given underlying shifts and vintage-specific circumstances (intended-use is taken here as incorporating consideration of overall grape quality and flavour development or ‘fitness for purpose’).
- The expected yield and maturation profile of production, for each relevant intended-use, under the shifts and circumstances.
- The resilience of the vineyard to extreme events, i.e., how yield and quality will be affected by extreme events (occurring at particular times in maturation).
These models are fundamental because they will describe quantitatively the response of a vineyard (or class of vineyards) under shifts, changes and events. From this, and over any particular year, a range of conceivable occurrences and impacts can be assessed and aggregated into overall expectations and probabilities, which in turn feed the grape-sourcing and logistical elements of the overall model.
The logistical challenges
Compared to the methodological and viticultural challenges, there is arguably less that is unknown about the necessary logistics modelling and optimisation that will be required. However, there remain many significant issues to be tackled. This is particularly so given that multiple performance measures must be applied, for example: returns to growers, producers and communities; carbon footprints; demands on infrastructure; claims on resources shared across industries, and so on. The ability to gather such information into “one place” (actually or virtually) will be a challenge from both commercial and technical perspectives.
The platform
The GSAP will integrate the probabilistic decision analysis methodologies, viticultural and logistical models, and climate and geographic information systems. In essence, GSAP will support combined logistical and viticultural analyses within an advanced simulation, optimisation and risk-management framework.
The generic problem, as addressed by GSAP in a wine-specific context, is the formation of asset, operating-policy and product portfolios in situations with strong environmental and logistical interdependencies as well as high uncertainty.
Where to from here?
The Adaptive Supply Networks team at CSIRO is seeking expressions on interest in the GSAP concept, from researchers and from industry.
We are keen to receive comment and feedback on the proposed concept:
- Could the GSAP be valuable to the Australian wine industry?
- Would your business make use of GSAP if it was available?
- Who is currently working in related areas?
- Do you have viticultural, mathematical or logistics knowledge that could assist us?
- Would you be interested in being part of the project's development?
For feedback and more information please contact Simon Dunstall at CSIRO.
Return to the Wine Supply Network Research home page of CSIRO Adaptive Supply Networks.
