Growers are finding their own combinations of old-time wisdom and new-fangled technologies to bring their vines into the 21st century.
We’ve all heard the tagline: “There’s an app for that.” But for grape growing? Nothing’s ever going to replace Wine Country’s famous soil, climate or collective wisdom. Yet state-of-the-art technologies are now being introduced in an increasing number of local vineyards. These innovations are organizing complex data, minimizing the use of valuable resources and making the job of growing some of the world’s best winegrapes just a little bit easier.
A new breed
Paul Goldberg of Napa is part of the new breed of viticulturists using technology to improve both quality and sustainability in our local grape growing industry. As director of operations at Bettinelli Vineyards in Napa, which includes multiple ranches spread over 350 acres throughout Napa Valley, he’s seen firsthand the benefits of incorporating technology with more traditional methods in the fields.
“The foundation for integrating technology started, for us, with installing solar powered, remote weather stations at all our vineyards,” says Goldberg. Remote weather stations, now present in 10 to 15 percent of Napa Valley vineyards, have been around for decades in their most basic form, displaying temperature, humidity, rainfall and wind speed, but now these stations are monitoring much more than just weather. They’re recording and reporting information about the soil moisture, water flow and even tracking maturity of potential pests in the vineyards using models based on site-specific weather conditions.
Today’s weather stations can be run off a satellite or Wi-Fi connection and can stream live data to online-based software, accessible by smartphone, tablet or computer from virtually anywhere. Because they’re solar-powered and relatively maintenance-free, weather stations can be placed in more remote or hard-to-reach locations.
Napa’s growers have generally relied on a group of cooperative weather stations spread throughout the county to help them predict and track weather conditions, but gathering customized information specific to particular vineyards can help avoid unnecessary use of resources, since conditions can vary significantly within just a few miles. “I can look at data coming in and make very proactive decisions about irrigation, frost protection and upcoming labor needs on each individual vineyard,” says Goldberg.
Once those decisions have been made, growers can also use remote control technologies to operate and monitor equipment like irrigation systems and wind machines from their computers or smartphones. A grower can program a remote weather station to email, call or text an alert if conditions approach a certain temperature during frost season, for example, and can turn on selected wind machines with the touch of a button.
Another useful tool is the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a type of aerial photograph of a plot of land, usually taken once or twice yearly at around the same time. These photos, used by many of Napa’s growers, can reveal vigor levels in various parts of a vineyard and guide users in creating appropriate action plans.
“An important factor that affects wine quality is uniformity throughout the vineyard, and NDVIs give us a report card on where we have uniformity and where we don’t,” he says. “I can tell where we need to irrigate more, put down more compost to increase soil fertility, or even devigorate areas by planting grasses or cover crops in the middle of rows to compete with the vines.”
Goldberg believes that technology has changed so fast over the last five years that most growers are still scratching the surface of what the possibilities are in vineyards—and in agriculture in general. “Over the next five to 10 years, we’re going to see some major technological advancements in Napa vineyards that will continue to improve quality and efficiency,” he predicts.
Mapping trends
Matt Lamborn is the owner of Pacific Geodata in Napa as well as director of vineyard operations at Lamborn Family Vineyards, founded by his father and grandfather on Howell Mountain in Angwin.
Pacific Geodata specializes in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping, a type of computer mapping that can include multiple images and layers in a single, easily accessible map. What distinguishes GIS from traditional survey maps is that different layers can be added to the map, with an aerial photo as a base and property lines, soil types and vineyard boundaries on top, for example. “People will map pruning weights, different nutritional values, pretty much anything you can dream up can be thrown in to the system,” explains Lamborn.
Pacific Geodata often works with growers who are laying out new vineyards, as well as helping owners of existing sites track and identify trends over time and fix trouble spots.
“If someone wants to plant three acres of Cabernet Sauvignon on virgin land, we can use a slope layer and aspect layer to find which way the ground is facing toward the sun at different points, then map out contour lines to show where vineyard boundaries can and should go, depending on particular farming practices and regulatory restrictions,” he says. “On the other end of the spectrum, someone may be having problems in a vineyard, and we can use vigor mapping to identify low vigor areas and create maps for that person to bring to a skilled viticulturist, reducing the time and effort required to manually track and identify problems on the ground.”
The maps’ data features let users store, manage and share many different types of information and create customized searches and queries. “Another powerful thing about GIS maps is that everything you can draw on a map can have data behind it,” says Lamborn. “So a vineyard block boundary on a map can have a database of historical viticultural data behind it. You can then ask the system, for example, to highlight all vineyard boundaries that have had historically low per-acre yields relative to other similar blocks.”
Nowadays, many consultants like Pacific Geodata make their maps available online in an interactive format. A client can pull up a personalized map, click on an individual block and instantly pull up that block’s viticultural data or other relevant databases.
Increasing sustainability
Pete Opatz of Cloverdale is vice president and senior viticulturist for Silverado Premium Properties in Napa. He’s also the owner of Route 128 Vineyards and Winery, which operates a tasting room in Geyserville.
Opatz is committed to increasing sustainability in the grape growing industry and is particularly interested in water use issues. As president of the Russian River Water Conservation Council, he’s partnered with the Mendocino County Flood District and the Sonoma County Water Agency to create a new, independent scientific body, headed up by Dr. Matt Kondoff of UC Berkeley, to conduct research on river flows and groundwater, ensuring that future water decisions are based on solid data.
In terms of water conservation tools, Opatz says there have been very few leaps forward, in terms of products introduced, in the last few years, as remote control and drip irrigation systems have increasingly become the norm. Instead, he believes growers are becoming more comfortable using the tools that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s and interpreting the information for their own needs.
Different types of devices to track soil moisture levels have been around for a long time, though they’re becoming increasingly accurate in helping growers use water resources more efficiently and irrigate only when and where necessary. As new technologies emerge as the gold standard, others can fall out of favor.
“For soil moisture readings, the state of the art is a nuclear device—literally,” says Opatz. “It uses a radium source to read how much hydrogen is in the soil. What’s evolved from that is a radio reflective device, which is able to give readings of almost the same accuracy and is much easier for growers to use because of the strict regulatory requirements needed for nuclear gauges.” The radio reflective device sends out a radio frequency that bounces off resistance in the soil, reading the soil’s moisture and electric conductivity.
Back at Bettinelli Vineyards, Goldberg uses moisture probes that are inserted one to six feet into the soil to track how depleted or moist the soil is at any given time. That data is streamed to online-based software, graphed on a curve and used to time irrigation schedules based on actual water needs.
“In many cases, new technology measuring soil moisture and vine water use has let us decrease our irrigations,” says Goldberg. “This really touches on all aspects of sustainability: making our labor force more efficient, using resources like water and energy much more efficiently and making farming a bit more cost-effective.”
The value of information
While all these new devices are making it easier than ever to collect mountains of data, growers might see it as just one more thing to keep track of—until they begin working with the tools and identifying the practical applications and the value of the information.
Duff Bevill of Healdsburg is a noted viticulturist and owner of Bevill Vineyard Management, providing vineyard management services to growers both big and small. He also tends to his own properties in Healdsburg and Santa Rosa.
“I know for a fact that we haven’t completely exploited the capability of phones and apps, but we’ve used a series of cooperatively owned, remote weather stations for more than a decade, strategically placed in vineyards throughout Sonoma County,” says Bevill. The stations are programmed to send alerts to cell phones when certain temperatures are reached at each individual ranch. Bevill says those alerts act like alarm clocks, giving growers enough time to get out to the properties to monitor the situation at hand. “Most of these changes are evolutionary, not revolutionary,” he says. “We used to rely on pagers, now we use iPhones.”
In the last five years, Bevill began using a field instrument called a pressure chamber—what some users call a “pressure bomb”—in the fields to measure water demand of the vines. With this device, a grape leaf and its stem are taken from sample vines at a specific time of day, typically once per week, and placed in a specialized chamber with the stem sticking out on top. When the chamber is sealed and pressurized, the process mimics how hard the leaf is working to pull moisture from the vine/roots. The response is graded on a scale of 1 to 20, and growers irrigate accordingly.
Another system used locally for measuring a vine’s water needs involves a collar that goes around the trunk of a grapevine. The collar measures the movement of water through the trunk, also known as sap flow. During warm daytime conditions, grapevines should respond to climatic demands by increasing sap flow. If the vines don’t detect enough moisture to match water demand, they won’t increase the flow, and growers are alerted to where, when and how much irrigation is needed.
Data collected by other field instruments are also helping to combat a fungal disease that’s been vexing grape growers for thousands of years. Powdery mildew is a huge concern in the industry, preferably dealt with through a preventive program of applying sulfur dust or similar materials at disciplined time intervals.
Several decades ago, researchers at UC Davis created computer models that mapped the correlation between temperature, humidity and time of the powdery mildew’s growth cycles. Growers with site-specific data gathering stations can plug their information into the models and better predict how frequently they need to apply a preventive dust or spray, potentially saving them time and resources and better protecting their crop.
Bevill adds that, while weather stations are useful in tracking low temperatures to protect crops from frost, they’re equally helpful in tracking high temperatures to protect something else valuable: the safety of his workers.
“If you want people to go home before a particular high temperature is reached to prevent heat-related injuries, you can have stations alert you at a lower-than-critical temperature as a warning,” says Bevill. “It helps in making smart decisions for the safety of our employees.”
Getting the word out
Growers are increasingly learning about the latest advancements by seeing them demonstrated at trade shows and symposiums, or by talking shop with friends and neighbors.
“It used to be that vendors and suppliers would just bring tractors and farming tools to a farm show,” remembers Bevill. “Now, the latest and greatest implements are new software programs for everything from accounting to mildew modeling.”
Local trade organizations like Napa Valley Grapegrowers and Sonoma County Winegrowers have also played a crucial role in getting information about these new technologies out to the growers.
“Napa Valley Grapegrowers has been instrumental in providing information about these technologies to both growers and farm workers,” says Goldberg, a director of the organization. “During educational seminars and annual trade shows, we talk a lot about how [particular technologies are] applicable to Napa Valley and how other growers are using it throughout the county.”
With a remote weather station costing somewhere between $1,500 and $7,000, depending on what kind of information you want to gather, cost is definitely a consideration. Base models might include just temperature and humidity, while more complex systems can also track wind direction, wind speed, rain levels and solar radiation, and be paired with other instruments to check soil moisture, soil temperature and leaf wetness.
Growers need to determine for themselves which devices fit their operation’s size and complexity. Bevill says he always does the math to determine the economic risk versus benefit before approaching clients about installing any new technologies.
“It’s relatively inexpensive technology if looked at from a per-acre basis, especially if you have a larger vineyard, and it can be invaluable in terms of making proactive decisions that lead to cost savings down the road,” says Goldberg. “It’s been an easy decision to integrate many of these new technologies. Most of them have been very effective in improving both quality and sustainability, especially when they’re used in combination with each other.”
Boots on the ground
You can’t broach the subject of vineyard technologies with a grape grower of any generation without hearing the same refrain: “Nothing replaces boots on the ground.”
“There’s a saying among the old guys: ‘If you don’t like the soil you’re standing on, turn and walk 100 yards in any direction. It’ll be different,’” jokes Opatz. “I do like the live streaming instruments for temperature, some soil moisture and soil temperature readings, but with the geological make-up of the North Coast, I’m very, very reluctant to suggest we rely on them completely.”
With so many variables at play and so much at stake, growers are finding their own combinations of old-time wisdom and new-fangled technologies to bring their vines into the 21st century.
“There’s no substitute for boots on the ground in a vineyard, but these technologies are a supplement to what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis, heading out to the ranches to take a look at what’s going on,” concludes Goldberg. “It’s another tool in our toolbox, and it’s very powerful.”
