Yesterday we had a team-building event that culminated with a visit to a local winery in Virginia, Chrysalis Vineyards. After the tasting, we were led by the enthusiastic winemaker Curtis into the area where the wine is actually "made", and he spoke to us at some length about the process (August is apparently an ideal time to visit, as the winery is cleaning and getting ready, so he had the time — come the fall they would be going all out to transform the first harvest into wine).
Chrysalis is an interesting vineyard, as 40 of their 50 acres are
planted with a native North American grape called the Norton (most
famous varietals are European). Beyond that though, I was fascinated
by Curtis’ offhand remark that given the right conditions, wine would
practically make itself. "Throw some grapes in a bucket, stomp the
juice out, and kick the bucket to the curb for a week and you’ll get
wine . . . IF, you have perfect fruit, temperature, humidity, …
Winemaking is the art and science of closing the distance between the
real world and that perfect world — which means Curtis and his
colleagues have a lot to do. Within the areas where the wine is made
and stored, advanced technology is used to control temperature and
humidity. In addition to the amount of science and planning, it was
interesting that the entire process was constantly "managed". When
asked when the wine is tasted to see how it is doing, the response was
"constantly" (this got a pretty good laugh, followed by several
applications for employment — but winemaking requires advanced
training . . . ).
The parallels to the E-Commerce Services world were not lost on me,
and given the head start that winemaking has, I guess it is going to be
a long time before we will be on auto-pilot. In a perfect world, data
would stream from business to business over the internet, and everyone
would structure data the same way, eliminating the need for
translation. There would be a single communications protocol that used
unbreakable encryption whose certificates never expired. But that is
not the world of E-Commerce today, and is not likely to ever be — so,
like the winemaker, our job is to close the gaps.
But the most striking similarity between winemaking and E-Commerce
has to be the requirement for constant management. As I think about
it, an increasing percentage of our internal technology investments go
to helping our global team manage the many programs we operate for
customers, and the timeframes for dealing with issues keep shrinking.
Like the vineyard that has only a very limited time to turn the grape
harvest into grapes, our customers have only minutes to get their data
to their partners. Unlike the vintner however, our time is growing
shorter (I am surmising harvested grapes today rot at the same speed
they rotted for the Romans), as the pace of business picks up. This
demands constanct management, so through our ever advancing visibility
and alert services, we too "taste constantly" — but I think maybe
Curtis enjoys his tasting more than we do…
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