Energy bills typically account for 15% of winery costs. This beer tech business has a solution

Two years after it successfully launched to Australia’s brewing industry, Frigid.Cloud has unveiled an adapted version of its cloud-based temperature control platform designed specifically for wine producers.

The tech business has also announced a partnership with Wine Australia to help support the launch.

“We are seeing a huge appetite for this technology in the brewing, and now wine industry, and with our recent commencement of an official partnership with Wine Australia we hope to expand our wine offering in Australia and beyond,” said Mark Gerschwitz, Founder.

“By providing an affordable, accessible and sustainable product to the industry, we hope to contribute to a successful and sustainable future for the wine industry in Australia.”

Already, Frigid.Cloud has signed McLaren Vintners, Hentley Farm, and Kaesler Wines to the 60 breweries already in its client roster. By using IoT devices and cloud-based software, Frigid.Cloud claims that a combination of tank cooling algorithms, solar optimisation, and automated water waste processing allows for energy reduction of up to 50%.

Given that energy costs typically account for around 15% of total wine production expenditure, Gerschwitz believes Frigid.Cloud’s expansion into wine presents a unique opportunity.

“The beauty of the wine industry is that they operate on a much bigger scale than craft breweries, so we’re super excited to see even higher reductions in energy costs in our wine clients.”

In a recent interview with Drinks Trade, Treasury Wine Estate’s Global Director of Sustainability Michael Parks said that, “since then we've had the war in Ukraine and all sorts of other shocks, we've seen energy prices just absolutely skyrocket.”

While TWE has made the transition to renewable energy to reduce costs and environmental footprint, Parks says that any method that decreases a winery’s energy use will be beneficial in the long run.

“Most people that work in wine are passionate about the land and water and being able to tap into that and engage your employee base and make them feel good about what you're doing as a company is something that's incredibly powerful,” he said.

Frigid.Cloud claims its technology will deliver direct sustainability improvements, financial savings, and improved product consistency to its customers.

Gerschwitz said, “our aim is to provide winemakers with access to a smart integrated network that not only offers automated temperature controls but also significantly reduces energy consumption through our one-of-a-kind proactive cooling tank management system.”

In addition to energy, another key factor environmental consideration for wine producers and grape growers alike is water usage. Furthermore, the efficiencies of water usage tend to decrease when focusing on producing premium wine.

In a recent interview with Drinks Trade, Treasury Wine Estate’s Global Director of Sustainability Michael Parks said that, “as we transition to being more a luxury world business, what we're seeing is that our traditional way of measuring efficiency is going the wrong way.

“When you're sort of doing more commercial style, you can have 100,000 litre tanks… whereas as we're [entering] a more luxury world, we're handling each package individually, and what that means is after each step of the process, we obviously need to clean and do all those things, and so your efficiency is impacted as a result.”

Currently, tradable water entitlements for irrigation and environment are worth $25-$35 billion in NSW. Deals such as TWE’s recent buy-back of $25.2m of water licenses linked to vineyards it was looking to sell are expected to become bigger and more important news as climates warm and water rights remain limited.