Custom Wine Making: Elite Vintners

How a modular system brought mass customization to the Canadian Wine Industry

Frequently asked, what is the next big market for mass customization, I always include food in my answer. While difficult to process, only few goods are so crafted for customization. Package size, ingredients, functionality, allergies, preferences, and of course taste are just some of the options where customization can start [One of our former researchers in the TUM Mass Customization Research Group, Stephan Jäger, even wrote his Ph.D. thesis on mass customization of food (thesis in German language)]. But not too many applications are known today.

So I was very much surprised when I learned about Elite Vintners, a Canada based company providing custom wine on the internet. While wine may only classify as food in France, it is a product perfectly suited for customization for the same reason, given all the different preferences and taste. And I was really impressed by this company's approach to customization. They created an online configurator, a real toolkit, to customize your next bottle of wine: www.elitevintners.com. This toolkit is remarkable as it is one of the very few toolkits which enter the field of taste which is much more difficult to describe and customize as fit or functionality (a similar toolkit is IFF's toolkit for industrial food flavors, described in a paper by Stefan Thomke and Eric von Hippel). In the US, Crushpad from San Francisco offers a similar service, but based on personal selling, not an internet configurator of the kind of Elite Vintners.
While for Europeans this kind of blending and mixing of wine concentrates, yeast, an oak "flavors" is still a bit strange, the system just replicates the normal way of wine making in many "new world" wineries. The company purchases high quality grape concentrate, and allows you to mix different grapes, an appropriate yeast and a mix of two oak additives from a large selection of strengths. And, for amateurs in wine making like me, the most impressive option was the alcohol content: You can even choose on a slider how much alcohol you want to have in your custom vintage. Of course the wine is bottled with your custom label and your own brand name on it. And finally, you will be surprised how affordable your custom collection is.

Just have a look on the toolkit and play around. But if your experience is more in drinking than in customizing wine, you may fell as I did: Overwhelmed and puzzled how your custom blend might really taste. Obviously, a web-based system can not offer a simulation of the outcome, but there could be a bit more references and indications, or perhaps a pre-configuration of popular blends with an exact description. The present target group of Elite Vintners are more mature and experienced home wine makers (see http://www.winepress.us or http://www.makewine.com for two user communities of this kind). And for this group, the toolkit and especially the stable and fully automated production process controlled by the toolkit offers a great opportunity to get their own creations in high quality. So cheerio on the next trend in mass customization!

Update: The Roots of Custom Wine Making

After I published this posting, I got great feedback by Tim Vandergrift of Winexpert Ltd, another supplier of custom wine making in Canada. Mr. Vandergrift mentioned that by reading the blog, he thought "Well, mass customization is exactly what we are doing for years" and was so kind to explain me the process of modularizing wine and condifuring at the point of sales:

"The consumer winemaking industry centres around a number of Canadian firms, and relies heavily on the mass customization paradigm. To give some background, the consumer-produced wine industry represents 20% of all wine consumed in Canada, both domestic and imported, and represents in excess of $300 million CAD at retail. Two provinces, British Columbia and Ontario, allow ‘Wine On Premise’, essentially personal wineries where customers may purchase a wine ‘kit’ (unfermented must, the raw material for wine) and contract for the production of small batches (typically 23 liters or roughly 30 bottles). The rest of the country has consumers purchasing the product and removing it to their homes for fermenting and processing.

Our company, Winexpert, produces wine kits equivalent to over 25 million bottles of finished wine every year. Where our mass customization comes in is in both the extent and variety of the product lines, the consumer packaging options (bottles, labels, capsules, etc.) and the value-added services and goods offered—wine related hardware and service items, custom barrel ageing, cellar planning, etc.

Customers begin their process by choosing the kind of wine experience they want by selecting the type of wine they wish to consume: we have five different value levels of kits, which lets the consumer choose not only the cost per bottle of their batch, but also the ageing curve: value-priced kits drink well relatively young but do not offer significant long-term ageing potential, while higher-end kits are less rewarding to drink immediately, but reward ageing with higher quality.

Because we source raw materials from wine regions all over the globe, we can offer French, California, Chilean, South African, Australian, etc, versions of the same varietal (i.e., the customer can choose between a muscular, fruit-forward Australian Cabernet Sauvignon, or the leaner, more elegant and structured French Cabernet) or even single-vineyard designated wines, such as Stag’s Leap Vineyard Napa Valley Merlot.

Outside of the ability to choose from over 70 different products in our line, the customer is able to choose a wide variety of packaging options, bottles come in different size, shape and color variations, there are thousands of pre-printed labels available, as well as partially printed stock labels that allow for either in-store overprinting of custom images and text, or at-home use. Bottles and labels are complimented by matching (or contrasting) capsules to finish the look of the package. This integrates a personalization element into our customization effort."

Comments

[jackee]

nice article and useful things about wine industry. i am a wine lover and always searching for new things in wine blogs.

[Gregory Finch]

Very interesting example of MCMP. So my big question: where can I have a taste before splurging for the hole 12 litres?

[Jude Darling]

Great Blog on MC. Great fine on Elite Vintners as an excellent example of MC and the use of configurators. What’s up with Winexpert’s note? I’m confused why Winexpert is even posted. Reviewed their site and no signs of customization dialogue or any web-based configurator. Winexpert appears to be an example of mass production paradigm or product-line selection for the “mass” customer. Reference is made to “mass customization paradigm” with an explanation. Unfortunately, this is not mass customization by principles or by definition. Instead, this is an example of a company catering to the abilities of their customer to provide product variety or selection (e.g, bottles and labels) at the retail level. The customer can then “customize” their wine labels and select from other products supplied by different manufacturers, each offering only one thing. There may be multiple choices of a single product, but they’re not customized just for that person. Okay, one step ahead of Model T Ford era of mass production and consumer demand, but with some multiple choice. Sorry, this example does not cut in the paradigm of mass customization. Not sure the importance of the sale’s figures either.

[Mda]

Tim: With all due respect, I don't believe you are describing mass customization, but rather mass selection, which, as you will agree, all the Canadian kit manufacturers offer. Mass Customization allows a single customerdirect access to the manufacturer and have a product made to his/her own specifications. This is a ono-on-one experience. Once made, the customer still has access to the myriad of bottles, lables, etc. that you describe, but the reality is that the winemaker may have made a product that possibly has never and will never be exactly duplicated. Like ordering a custom pair of Nike's, the customer gets a pair of athletic shoes that exactly fil his needs while Nike continues to market thousands of standard fit shoes that are mass produced, not mass customized.
Mike