site.btaA Software Engineer Offers Vine Growing and Wine Making Solutions

If you were raised around your father's vineyards and have participated in wine making since you were a child, you can hardly discard your memories and roots. Even if you grew up to become a software engineer, your closeness to nature and the urge to make yourself useful inevitably fuse with your knowledge of the language of programming to form an innovative symbiosis. Such is the case of Blagoi Anastasov, a young man in Kuklen, in southern Bulgaria's Plovdiv Region, who, as he puts it, started making wine before he knew how to drink it, Radio Sofia said in a recent documentary, as quoted on Agri.bg.

"My father grew grapes and other fruit crops. I began helping him when I was a child. I remember one bad year, when our vineyard was afflicted with multiple diseases. I was a practicing software engineer by then, and I began to make calculations and to look for correlations," Blagoi said.

He and his friend Nikolai Sapundzhiev established a start-up company to help vine growers and wine producers make informed decisions by using a smart software application. In this way, they could optimize their expenses and pick the right moment to treat their crop and carry out agronomic activities.

The working process is based on an analysis of data from the vineyard. It employs sensors which measure the air and soil temperature, the humidity of the air and inside the vine leaves, the amount of rain and the speed and direction of the wind.

The engineer explained: "We make the necessary analysis, and the farmer can be informed that, for instance, the risk of blight will be 80% in six days. Or that there are no conditions for diseases to develop in the next 10 days and therefore there is no need to spray the vineyard."

Blagoi and Nikolai have no competition in Bulgaria for their software solution, but similar technologies are available in other European countries. What sets them apart is the distinction between grape varieties.

Blagoi explained: "A vine grower usually has multiple grape varieties in his vineyards: white grapes and red grapes, for the table and for making wine, with soft or hard skin. Our software can tell him, for instance, that his 10 ha of Muscat Ottonel are currently at great risk, but his 40 ha of Mavrud are out of danger. So, he will know that he needs to spray only those 10 ha of Muscat Ottonel, not the whole vineyard."

When it comes to the wine making part of the process, Blagoi and Nikolai have another software solution which can trace the variety-specific history of the grapes, from vegetation through all phenological stages to fermentation, until the wine is poured into the bottle.

In a special digital log, enologists and technologists can record the manipulations and analyses they have carried out and the additives they have used for every batch of wine. The information will be very useful if they want to look, for example, five years back. It is also handy when an employee quits the company and someone is recruited to replace him - the records will help ensure continuity.

The software company provides a QR code which is attached to the label on the wine bottle and contains information about the wine. It meets an EU requirement for all wines bottled after December 8, 2023, to carry information about their energy value and ingredients. The QR code is for the customers who need to choose what wine to buy in a shop.

"We plan to expand beyond the Bulgarian market with our app," Blagoi said. "Coming out abroad is a must, but developing partner channels in business is one of the hardest things to do. We are partners with a French company which manufactures 'weather stations', that is, vineyard sensor systems. We also keep in contact with Greek companies."