The robots are coming: How Bordeaux is combining technology with viticulture
Much of the winemaking and vineyard work in Bordeaux is done by hand, but robots are becoming an increasingly common sight up and down the Gironde.
From its ordered rows of vines to serried ranks of barrels in the cellars of stately château, Bordeaux is the pitch-perfect image of French viticultural tradition.
Immaculate brochures portray the rhythms of the season, pruning, harvest and cellar work – all done by hand, artisanal, unchanged for centuries.
Yet Bordeaux’s traditional ways are increasingly underpinned by the most cutting-edge technology. It started in the gleaming chais but the next wave of innovation has been sweeping the vineyards.
From treatment regimes to mowing and ploughing, Bordeaux is alive with robotic technology.
Scanning the skies
Weather stations, for example, odd looking structures, are now commonplace among the vines.
Linked via the internet, they continuously monitor the weather, temperature, humidity, sunlight and wind. Their precise feedback and modelling of pervasive fungal diseases – available on smartphone screens – allows for vine treatments to be used with pinpoint precision.
This is a huge improvement, financial and environmental, on the blanket treatments of the past. In the late 1980s, when I first arrived in Bordeaux, it wasn’t unusual to see bright blue vines systematically treated with copper sprays.
Drones are another quick and easy way to detect vine disease. Eleonore Pairault, whose family owns Château Teynac in St-Julien and Château Corconnac in Haut-Médoc studied aeronautical law before joining the family property.
She uses her drone pilot licence to take images of the vineyard to identify diseased, damaged or dead vines. It doesn’t replace the vineyard worker, but it’s a quick overview, more precise and immediate than satellite images, and helps plan future work such as placing anti-frost equipment.
Labour shortages
At Château Canon la Gaffelière in St-Emilion, a little robot makes its way up and down rows of vines, gently ricocheting from one vine to another, mowing the cover crops in between the vines.
The vineyard equivalent of your robot lawn mower (which Château Troplong Mondot uses to keep its lawns immaculate), it is lightweight so it doesn’t compact the soil, electric with a low carbon footprint, and autonomous.
Seeing a driverless tractor is more surprising, I did a double take the first time I saw one in Pomerol, trundling through the vines of Château Petit Village.
Developed in Champagne, Bakus Vitibots are now being tested and adopted across Bordeaux. Are these machines an answer to the vineyard labour crisis?
According to research by Mutualité Sociale Agricole (MSA) 10,000 out of 60,000 vineyard posts are currently vacant in the Gironde and vineyards often lament the difficulty of finding skilled workers for the vineyards.
Guillaume Fredoux, technical director of Château Petit Village and Château Beauregard agrees that labour saving is one element, but the Baku is also quick, and precise. More precise than the best tractor drivers – who are almost impossible to find.
Tests started in 2021. After just three demonstrations of the electric ‘enjambeur’, Fredoux was convinced. It has been operational since April 2022.
The initial investment in both time and money is obviously substantial. The tractor works by GPS, each and every point of its route must be mapped out. It’s piloted from a mobile phone but once running it’s autonomous, learning as it goes, using captors and cameras – memorising missing vines for example.
The Baku is used uniquely for working the soil, it carries the tools for ploughing, tilling, covering and uncovering the vines. It‘s very energy efficient, and the tools are electric rather than hydraulic (as on a classic tractor). It is also lighter than a classic tractor, lowering both its carbon footprint and soil compaction.
In Bordeaux’s climate too, where frequent rains can wash away freshly applied treatments, electric tractors eliminate the trade-off between protecting biodiversity and the carbon footprint created by frequent passes through the vines. In turn, this allows growers to reapply sprays if needed and the lighter tractors don’t churn up the claggy soils in the process.
Attracting new talent
Philippe de Poyferré, director of Château Loudenne in the Médoc, agrees it’s one solution to the problem of finding qualified tractor drivers, but it could also be part of the solution to attracting younger people to work and stay in the vines and to improve their skills.
Introducing technology offers more interesting careers for young people. These machines require programming, supervision and repairs. It’s less physically demanding work than a traditional tractor driver and more appealing and accessible, opening up opportunities to a broader work base.
Helping hand
Robots can’t do everything, vineyards still need skilled vine workers. But those workers both need and demand better conditions.
Pruning, trimming and de-budding is hard, physical work. A vine worker can cover five kilometres a day among the vines. According to the MSA, 66% of vineyard employees who left say it was due to the physical challenges of the work, 62% of future workers consider the working conditions in the vineyard unsatisfactory
There have been attempts to alleviate the physical strain. Pneumatic and electric secateurs help to reduce repetitive strain injuries and protect fragile fingers.
Château Dillon in Blanquefort – part of the Lycée Agricole viticulture school – conducted three tests with motorised seats – complete with shading parasols. The tests did not meet with universal approval and implementation depends upon the topography and the state of vineyards.
Further tests with supportive ‘exoskeletons’ have yielded some positive results but so too has implementing a simple pre-work warm-up routine for the vineyard teams.
It would seem the days of power-unit-enhanced pruning crews are still some way off – for now.
Robot Co-operation
However, anyone visiting a premium wine region such as Bordeaux in the near future shouldn’t be surprised to see autonomous robots at work.
And you know the robots are here to stay when they are being rolled out for wine tourists.
The Monbazillac Cooperative in the Dordogne has been part of the regional research project with VitiRev – a project committed to supporting companies towards the end of pesticide use in viticulture in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region – since 2020.
This has included testing an autonomous tractor on the 30 hectares that the co-op owns around the Château of Monbazillac.
Over 100 000 people visit the château every year, and this summer the co-op will be showing off the new ‘Ted’ weeding robot from Naïo Technologies.
A member of the co-op is on hand to explain how and why it works, it leads to lively discussions around sustainability and technology and gives a more dynamic image to viticulture, often seen as archaic.
A driverless robot weeding vines in front of a medieval monument is a telling illustration of how the very old can work with the very new.
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