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This is part of our  about how innovators are thinking up new ways to make you — and the world around you — smarter. 

Does my septum deviate slightly to the left? I wonder this as I stick my nose into a glass of 2016 cabernet sauvignon and feel the burn more strongly down one side than the other. Florencia Palmaz, co-founder and partner at Palmaz Vineyards, tells me this happens to most people.

I'm sitting with four others at a long, honey-colored wood table in her office in Napa, California.

Swap out the furniture, and you'd have a hell of an Airbnb with its views of vineyards and a ceiling-high, arched glass doorway. We each have eight glasses lined up in front of us, along with palate-cleansing bread sticks, glasses of water and what look like glass soda bottles filled with wine.

There are periods of near silence as we begin the serious business of tasting. Swirl, sniff, taste, spit.

Repeat. After all, it might be Napa — where millions of tourists come to enjoy the iconic scenery, fancy restaurants and, obviously, wine — but everyone in this room is on the job. It's why this tasting also includes a laptop and tablet on the table and a large TV screen on the office wall.

We're looking at graphs.

The young red wines in the glasses in front of me all have histories documented in data.

That ranges from the time their grapes first peeped out on the vines, to how their particular plots of land affected their growth, to when they were harvested and placed in fermentation tanks, turning into alcohol.

As I swirl the liquid in one glass, Florencia tells me the same kinds of grapes used to make that wine were used in the glass beside it. The only difference is they come from two different parcels of land.

That one element means the wines taste different and smell different — although the complexities are lost on someone whose mouth has never been the same after an unfortunate incident in 1998 with scalding hot chocolate.

The 9,000-year old tradition of making wine might not conjure visions of the future, but when I ask a wine industry expert about the most cutting-edge wineries, he spells out "P-A-L-M-A-Z."  The Palmaz family is betting that technology and winemaking are a great pairing.

"[Winemakers] are spending less time worrying about mundane details and more time being creative," says Christian Palmaz, president of Palmaz Vineyards and Florencia's younger brother.

"My job is to make sure they get all the elements they need to the finish line, so that when they sit down and actually blend the wine, create the wine — paint the painting — those elements are there wooden paintings for living room them.