Up until recently, the methods wineries used to decide what to produce and what to sell have been almost entirely subjective. Without data, it was really hard to figure out how to make a great wine that would sell well in the market. But in an extremely competitive market, where many wineries only have one shot per season to make a great wine, more and more winemakers are looking for ways to predict what consumers will like, so they can create better products and increase their profits. Now Tastry, a sensory sciences company based in California, is using machine learning and advanced chemistry to teach artificial intelligence to "taste" – and that technology is shaking up the wine industry by providing valuable information to winemakers and retailers about the wines that customers enjoy. I interviewed Katerina Axelsson, Founder and CEO of Tastry, about how her company uses artificial intelligence to recommend wines to consumers and advise wineries about what products to make.

A couple of years ago my wife and I visited the Bonny Doon Vineyard near Santa Cruz to sample the offerings of winemaking savant Randall Grahm. While we were there, Grahm told us something I haven't been able to forget. It wasn't nearly as foggy along Monterey Bay as it used to be, he said, and that was worrisome for winemakers. With each dose of aberrant weather California has had since then, I found myself wondering how California's wineries were faring and whether the noble grape was becoming a marker -- along with sea level rise and deadly wildfires -- of an overcooked planet. A few weeks ago I called Grahm to continue the conversation.

The company's app and platform lets wineries and wine producers create, manage, and market an augmented reality experience for their own labels via a smartphone app. Now, says the company, 524 wineries from across the world are participating in the trial and accessing the marketing potential of a marriage of artificial intelligence and augmented reality. "I don't believe anything like this has been done to this level before – bringing together artificial intelligence, augmented reality, clever technology, 500 different wineries with different visuals and branding, as well as different languages," says app creator and Winerytale founder Dave Chaffey. "This platform is purpose-built for mass adoption and accessibility to any winery wanting to take advantage of a brand marketing and sales future that will undeniably involve augmented reality." The technology is designed to work on any wine label, using artificial intelligence to scan and recognize labels, and augmented reality to showcase the wine's backstory by beaming it from an imaginary space inside and outside of the bottle.

Iberian winemakers have tended vineyards by hand since before the Roman Empire. Today, traditional winemaking techniques still hold sway in the third largest wine producing nation in the world. But 2016 could be the year it all changes. Even though less than 10 percent of Spanish wineries use advanced technologies now commonly seen in places like Australia and the United States, "there are many that have tried them this year," says Fran Garcia Ruiz, director of agricultural data company AgroMapping. Spanish wineries, which have more than 2.9 million acres of vineyards, have lagged behind counterparts elsewhere in adopting new technology.

The Australian wine industry is turning to artificial intelligence to streamline its manufacturing. South Australian tech firm Ailytic has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program to significantly increase production efficiency by optimising machine use. It uses an AI technique called'prescriptive analytics' to account for all the variables that go into mass-producing wines such temperature, wine changeover and inventory. The program then creates the best possible operation schedule, allowing companies to save considerable time and money. Ailytic's list of clients includes world-renown wine companies such as Pernod Ricard, Accolade Wines and Treasury Wine Estates.

Charles A. Rosen, an engineer who was an early researcher in robotic and artificial intelligence and a founder of Ridge Vineyards in Cupertino, Calif., died on Dec. 8 at his home in Atherton, Calif. Born in Montreal, Mr. Rosen came to the United States as a teenager. He studied electrical engineering at Cooper Union in New York City and earned a Ph.D. at Syracuse University. During World War II, he returned to Canada to work on Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft being sent to Britain. After the war, he worked on transistor theory at General Electric Research Laboratories in Schenectady, N.Y., and was the coauthor of an early book on the subject.

Charles Rosen, who pioneered artificial intelligence in the 1960s and 1970s and helped found one of California's best known wineries, died in Atherton on Dec. 8, one day after his 85th birthday. Mr. Rosen did his groundbreaking artificial intelligence work while at Stanford Research Institute, known now as SRI International, a Menlo Park nonprofit research and development organization. His success came from his ability to find the edge of creative thought and innovation in his discipline and to push past the known limits, friends and colleagues say, developing things like neural networks in machines and Shakey, the first robot to see and learn on its own. "If it looked new and exciting and untried, that was Charlie's meat," said Nils Nilsson, who was hired by Mr. Rosen at the institute and chaired the computer science department at Stanford University from 1985 to 1990. "He loved that sort of thing, especially if people cautioned him against it."