Artificial Intelligence Methods for Constructing Wine Barrels with a Controlled Oxygen Transmission Rate

Abstract

Oxygen is an important factor in the wine aging process, and the oxygen transmission rate (OTR) is the parameter of the wood that reflects its oxygen permeation. OTR has not been considered in the cooperage industry yet; however, recent studies proposed a nondestructive method for estimating the OTR of barrel staves, but an efficient method to combine these staves to build barrels with a desired OTR is needed to implement it in the industry. This article proposes artificial intelligence methods for selecting staves for the construction of barrel heads or bodies with a desired target OTR. Genetic algorithms were used to implement these methods in consideration of the known OTR of the staves and the geometry of the wine barrels. The proposed methods were evaluated in several scenarios: homogenizing the OTR of the actual constructed barrels, constructing low-OTR and high-OTR barrels based on a preclassification of the staves and implementing the proposed method in real cooperage conditions. The results of these experiments suggest the suitability of the proposed methods for their implementation in a cooperage in order to build controlled OTR barrels.

Characterization of Anthocyanins and Anthocyanin-Derivatives in Red Wines during Ageing in Custom Oxygenation Oak Wood Barrels

“…The classification of the fresh staves was carried out based on the structural features of the oak staves by means of Artificial Neural Network to predict OTR. The characteristics of each fresh stave were obtained by image analysis of the heads of each stave and based on the potential OTR obtained from the artificial neural network (ANN), and they were classified into three groups: High-OTR, Low-OTR and the rest [ 16 ]. Finally, the staves for building 8 barrels with High-OTR and 8 barrels with Low-OTR were selected from the classified groups based on genetic algorithms to obtain a homogeneous group of high oak wood OTR (HW-OTR) barrels and low oak wood (LW-OTR) barrels.…”

“…Different studies have shown the viability of controlling the oxygen that wines receive during their ageing in barrels [ 13 , 14 ], demonstrating the capability of making barrels with different wine oxygenation rates. A recent work by Prat-García et al, 2020 [ 15 ], evaluated the oxygen transmission rate (OTR) of barrels made with the Martinez-Martínez et al’s 2019 method [ 16 ]. This method allows staves to be classified by their potential OTR based on their anatomical properties, besides the traditional grain, obtained by image analysis of the wood.…”