A few weeks ago I wrote about filling the empty seats at the table of wine + data, and I appreciate very much your responses to that post especially over on LinkedIn.

There were a few things I noticed about your responses: how many of you tagged other colleagues or friends, and also how many of those tags were to people whose professional roles fall outside of the wine and spirits industry.

It made me think about the pipeline, and the different streams feeding into it that will help to fill the empty seats at the table of wine + data.

There is, indeed, a groundswell of interest in wine + data, as evidenced most recently by the attendance at the data literacy focus group that my colleague Valerie Logan and I hosted a few weeks ago. Those attendees (who all work within wine and spirits) are part of the conversation, certainly, on how to fill more seats at the table.

In a complementary way, there are also those “tags” to people who work in industries outside of wine and spirits. On one hand are wine people who are interested in data, and on another hand are data people who are interested in wine.

That balance is reflected in my commitments to speaking engagements in the coming weeks. About half of those commitments are in the wine space, including the FINE Wine Tourism Expo in Spain and the On The Spot podcast by Outshinery. About half of those commitments, too, are in the data space, including the INFORMS Business Analytics Conference this past week and DATAcated Conference next month that highlights the trends and challenges of data use cases across various industries.

Various industries, that is, like wine and spirits.

I see this parallel development as a cross-pollination, of some seeds being planted here and other seeds taking root or blooming over there.

Or, to use a more manufactured metaphor, we can see the parallel development as those two streams feeding into the pipeline. One from wine, one from data.

No one knows yet the extent or shape of the outcome. But I do know that I’m glad to be part of it with you.

Thank you for reading. As always.