agtech andeswines.com looks to rescue ancient vineyards in unexpected places
Contxto – As a Latin American wine lover, your favorite tipple may be closer than you think. Or it will be soon, thanks to AndesWines.com. This is because the Chilean company is looking to deploy the agtech that it has developed into the wider regional market.
What for exactly? You may ask. Well, if you’d only read on instead of interrupting you would have already have found out.
It turns out that agricultural engineer, Maximiliano Morales, founder of the AndesWines website, will now be hunting through ancient data to find and rescue the regional vineyards of old. He’ll be starting in Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina.
An old hand in the enotourism industry himself, on discovering said vineyard, Morales will be imparting training. These will consist of courses on acceleration, customer management, and scaling, as he has been doing in Chile over the past five years for startups, SME (small and medium-sized enterprises), and established wineries.
Yet, he is one of many oenologists from the Southern Cone to give such classes, so he is looking to diversify in other ways. Therefore, if the wine weren’t enough, this startup is setting its sights on the expansion of those other Latin American staples: coffee and cacao.
Vintage startups: you’d have to be an oxymoron
The founder of AndesWines.com has a history working in the wine industry, 18 years to be precise. However, he has always kept an eye on the historical aspect of the drink.
As a Chilean, his interest has always been on those oldest of vineyards scattered around his country founded by those first Spanish and French settlers.
Yet, Morales is going one step further, venturing beyond the Argentinian and Chilean heartlands of Latin American wine and into subtropical, desert, and Andean foothill enology. The atypical ventures will, therefore, be heavily dependent on cutting-edge agtech and winetech, with the ultimate vision of linking them up with broader tourismtech across the board in each new country.
Crafted crops by CORFO
The question is; what does this magic winetech involve?
Well, it is all less wine specific than you may imagine at first. Mainly, the innovations come in packaging most founders and tech-heads will recognize. That is data management and processing, but in this case to take into account agro-climatic variables.
Obviously, being from Chile, this founder got his start with Chile’s innovation and economic development agency, CORFO. But for once, it wasn’t as a beneficiary of this governmental agency, but rather as its strategic counselor and Director of Chile’s Strategic Node on wine and vineyards.
CORFO always gets involved in interesting programs, but this is something I can really raise my glass to.
-AG
