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WINEMAKING Not every brewery, of course, has gone high tech. Located in nearby Berkeley, Calif., Triple Rock is one of the country's oldest brewpubs and turns 25 this year. General manager Jesse Sarinana showed me the innards of the brewery (not much larger than my garage "winery") and walked me through the process. Temperature is carefully monitored, but, for example, the stream of hot water that strikes the mash has a little cold water toggled into it by hand. Any haze in finished beer is spotted by eyeballs, not photometric analyzers. Triple Rock's 12,000- barrel annual output skips the fuss of bottling and goes directly into taps supplying loyal customers in the alehouse. Even so, Triple Rock's one rudimentary piece of automation—a water boiler controlled by a timer, so that the water is nice and hot when the brewers show up— puts it one step ahead of many small commercial wineries. From malted barley to the Rogers Adoption Curve So, how come one form of fermentation is more automated than the other? For starters, beer brewing is much more predictable, repeatable and recipe-driven. Brewing starts with uniform supplies of dried, clean grains and hops, sitting in a warehouse waiting to be trans- formed. This allows brewers the freedom to say that if this is Tuesday, let's make some Hefeweizen. This is a far cry from the wine harvest, when grapes arrive when they're good and ready, in whatever condi- tion, requiring whatever adjustments just to make them presentable. Still, once that preliminary judgment is made about how to pro- ceed with batch X, there is no theoretical reason that fermentation could not proceed with the help of monitoring and control technolo- gies handling temperature, pump over timing, falling Brix levels and so on, which would allow the winemaker to spend less time checking Brix and more time worrying about the next load of grapes. Beer, like distilled spirits, thrives on consistency, predictability and uniformity from bottle to bottle over time. That's surely how the mega-breweries succeed: Every bottle of Bud Light is just as uninspiring as the last. If smaller breweries want to offer some- thing a little different, they just work up a new grain bill or toss in some apricot flavoring. Fine wine, at least, and certainly wines from small producers (the vast majority of wineries) make vineyard and vintage variation into a selling point. "We're making a number of small batches consistently through the year," says Trumer's Larson, "and they have to all taste the same. Automation helps ensure that. Winemakers revel in differences from year to year." On the other hand, that valuable variability in wine comes—or should come—from the grapes, not from lapses or skipped steps or exhaustion-produced miscues in the cellar. One can easily ar- gue that greater automation and process control in the winery is the very best way to preserve the fascinating variability in grapes, the expression of terroir. Rogers Adoption Curve Innovators adopters 2.5% Early 13.5% majority 34% Early majority 34% Late Everett Rogers' book, "Diffusion of Innovations," discusses his theory about the adoption of new products, methods and technologies. Laggards 16% Wines & Vines sePTeMBeR 2011 53