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Oct 15, 2024

Area company's new digital-touch table aims to make anyone a wine connoisseur | Business | santafenewmexican.com

A local creative technology and exhibit design company is giving Santa Fe a unique way to experience wine through its new interactive digital-touch wine-tasting table. Ideum, the designer and

A local creative technology and exhibit design company is giving Santa Fe a unique way to experience wine through its new interactive digital-touch wine-tasting table.

Ideum, the designer and developer of the Tasting Table and its Windows-based software, the Wine Experience, announced the new product in September and has been showcasing it at pop-up events in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The table will be at VARA's Santa Fe Tasting Room — VARA Winery was involved in the final editing of the software experience — through Friday.

Ideum, founded in California in 1999, moved to Corrales in 2006 and has worked with aquariums, cruise lines, beverage establishments and museums to create touch tables and walls, custom hardware and interactive exhibits around the world. Jim Spadaccini, Ideum founder and an amateur winegrower, said the company has been doing beverage-focused products for a while now and saw an opportunity to make a touch table that surrounds the experience of tasting.

The bar-height table, made of steel and wood, is crafted completely in New Mexico, seats four and is topped by a 55-inch touch display screen that, with the help of advanced object-recognition software and custom wine coasters that are filled with 3D-printed material, recognizes what wine is placed on the table.

The table provides skippable step-by-step wine-tasting tips for those who may be new to the world of wine, as well as geographical and agricultural information about the wine they're trying. The table also features a tasting wheel that allows guests to make selections about what they're tasting. The responses are collected and can provide data to winemakers and wineries about what flavors and aromas customers are associating with their wines.

While the technology is fancy, Spadaccini said his goal is to move wine tasting away from the intimidating process that is led by a wine expert telling you what you're tasting to a more relaxed, participatory and engaging experience among friends.

"The whole idea is giving people agency, giving them the ability to express themselves and have conversations about what they're tasting," Spadaccini said.

Krysta Acree, 39, came from Rio Rancho to experience the Tasting Table at a wine tasting at VARA's Santa Fe Tasting Room last week and said she was a fan of the experience as someone who is new to wine.

"When you don't do it all the time — like you don't do wine tastings, you don't drink wine all the time — it's a little bit intimidating. And I do think that it's sort of a bridge between people who have been wine enthusiasts for a long time to the beginners, because now we can talk about it," Acree said.

After leaving VARA, the Tasting Table will be at a wine tasting at the New Mexico Museum of Art on Saturday.

The Tasting Table will be permanently installed at the New Mexico Wine Association's new tasting room in Old Town Albuquerque later this fall. The table will expand to sparkling wines in the future and will be available to purchase at roughly around $30,000, with the first three years of software included, in early 2025.

What: Saints & Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain Symposium, a free artist talk featuring Frederico Vigil, who created a fresco telling the history of wine in New Mexico, and a ticketed Wine Tasting on the Plaza, featuring VARA Winery and Mission Winery.

When: Oct. 19; symposium from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and wine tasting from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Where: New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave.

More info: VARA's Santa Fe Tasting Room is open 3 to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 3 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, at 329 W. San Francisco St.

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