Moët Hennessy Directs AI to Sniff Out a Stubborn Problem in Winemaking

Good morning. Sensing technology—like cameras and microphones—is good at capturing the sights and sounds around us and feeding them into AI models for analysis. But what about the things we smell?

Sensing these invisible molecules is much less straightforward, yet it holds a lot of business promise—especially for a company like Moët Hennessy.

The luxury wine unit at LVMH said a pesky defect known as Fresh Mushroom Aroma has started to appear across its grape crop and the whole Champagne region in recent years. The defect is undetectable to humans until after the grapes are fermented into wine, when it then spoils the yield. It doesn’t occur every year (most recently manifesting in the 2023 crop). But when it does, the results are disastrous and can cost the company millions of euros in wastage, said Manuel Reman, member of the Moët Hennessy Executive Committee, overseeing R&D.

Finding a way to detect the defect in the grape juice before the lengthy fermentation process was the focus of a recent research collaboration between the winemaker, the semiconductor and software firm Analog Devices and the University of California, Davis.

Analog Devices built a machine that used a new type of chemical sensor developed in-house to capture olfactory data from the grape juice. Then together with Moët Hennessy and UC Davis, it trained an AI model to determine the likelihood that a it was infected with Fresh Mushroom Aroma. Early testing showed 99% accuracy.