Wine may taste better than ever this summer and here's why

**Christy Strawser** (0:00)
This is On Deadline, where the biggest stories, the smartest journalists, and the conversations that matter come together from Audacy news stations across the country.
When news breaks, the story doesn't stop there. I'm Christy Strawser, let's get started. Let's set a scene. The air is soft, you're outside, your surroundings are green and filled with people you love spending time with. What's in your hand? Let's talk about that with KCBS in the Bay Area.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
The Bay Area grape harvest is getting off to a very early start this year, the earliest in decades. KCBS's Matt Bigler with our story from Wine Country.

**Matt Bigler** (0:39)
It's the start of the 201st wine grape harvest in Sonoma Valley. It's the earliest we've ever done this. The reason says Ned Hill, owner of LaPrenda Vineyards and Winery, an early season heat wave caused the vines to fruit out early. That means a smaller harvest, but hopefully higher quality grapes. So the vines are very lush this year. They're growing great. Vine health is fantastic. And we're irrigating very little, if at all, right now.
These Chardonnay grapes are being picked not by hand, but one of the only mechanical grape harvesters in wine country, which Hill says is faster and better at cutting stems. All they're getting is the berries, is the grapes. And so it can go straight into the press. And so it's better at the wineries. It's one less step that they have to do. In Sonoma, Matt Bigler, KCBS.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:27)
We are all getting used to using our phone to pay for credit card transactions or get into ticketed events. Now get ready for a digital drivers license. KCBS's Scott Cohn with our story.

**Scott Cohn** (1:40)
The digital drivers license has been around in California since 2023, but on a very limited basis, with a cap of just 15 percent of the licenses issued. Now Governor Newsom has signed a bill raising the cap to 60 percent, and he posted a video to show how easy it is.

**Gavin Newsom** (1:56)
Review and submit. Looks good, don't like the photo, but that's another who likes their DMV photo.

**Scott Cohn** (2:04)
You'll be able to use the new license at the airport to get through TSA checkpoints at some businesses, not all, and it'll make some DMV services easier. But, and this is a big but, you can't use your mobile drivers license for driving. Law enforcement will only accept the hard copy. Ed Swenson with the DMV says, give it time.

**Ari Waldman** (2:24)
A few years ago, we didn't use our phones to pay with a credit card anymore. Now, we tap everywhere.

**Scott Cohn** (2:28)
The governor's office has three and a half million Californians applied for digital licenses under the pilot program. The expansion will make nearly 17 million of us eligible.

**Christy Strawser** (2:38)
Digital drivers licenses are another example of the dizzying pace of change. But how are we supposed to keep up with the ethical demands of AI usage? Here's more from KCBS.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:51)
Professor Ari Waldman, now we mentioned things like facial recognition, license plate readers, predictive policing software. Has surveillance technology come along faster and more advanced, maybe compared to what most of us think?

**Ari Waldman** (3:07)
I think it's more available than most people think. So when you drive past an intersection, people often see or you might notice a couple of cameras.
And people assume that they're just there to monitor traffic flow, or they're there to take a snapshot. But many of those cameras, even the ones that were installed years ago, have been updated to include facial recognition technology and include other forms of AI that not only collect information, but then use it for something else. We see it in arenas, at Disneyland, we see it all over the place. And most of the time, you don't know that it's there. The people that do know it's there, especially when it comes to predictive policing software, are the people who are over surveilled, right? Those people who are the subjects or the victims of the surveillance or treated differently because of their race, because of where they live and so forth.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:08)
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned facial recognition being at arenas and places like that. I know that there have been concerns raised by, say for instance, people of color who say that facial recognition doesn't always recognize their face.

**Ari Waldman** (4:25)
That's right. In a way, it's not that they just don't recognize the faces, it's that because they don't recognize and routinely don't recognize black faces correctly, that people can be misidentified and then someone could be arrested for something that they didn't do. When you are a member of a class of people that are over surveilled and over policed, that leads to all sorts of collateral consequences.