New York State: mapping vineyards online and in time

Wines & Vines, July, 1999 by Linda McCandless

Winemakers in New York will always rely on yeast and sugar, but the Riesling, Pinot and Chardonnay they bottle in the next century may have as much to do with satellites, digital weather sensors, and global positioning systems as they do with tradition.

"The French have spent centuries fine-tuning the art of vineyard site selection for vinifera grapes. New York grape growers have barely 100 years experience with the more profitable, highly-sensitive varieties," said Robert Seem, a plant pathologist at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., who is seeking to improve growers' odds. "Using Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, we have layered digital map and weather data collection systems and produced them over the Internet. Growers now have access to the data they need to situate vineyards optimally and expand production," he said.

The Cornell University professor is a leader in the application of site-specific weather information for the estimation of plant disease risk and has been involved in a three-year project to develop a database to provide better site maps for vineyard selection in New York State.

The project is funded by a $47,000 grant from the Viticulture Consortium, a federally funded program that supports research activities in grape-growing and winemaking in New York State and California. Cooperators and collaborators are Steve DeGloria, an international expert on the use of spatial data analysis for environmental applications in the department of Soil Crop and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell in Ithaca; Roger Magarey, a graduate student in plant pathology at Geneva; Tony Wolf, an authority on viticultural production at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Tim Martin-son, area specialist with the Finger Lake Program who has established a temperature monitoring network throughout the Finger Lakes.

"The vineyard site selection maps for New York are based on climate, soil, land use, and elevation," said Seem. The maps are accurate to 1 [km.sup.2] resolution, and can be viewed on the web at http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/pp/faculty/seem/magarey. In two or three years, the team expects to have some climate maps refined to the hectare level. A hectare is 2.2. acres; New York vineyards average from 50 to 100 acres in size. General information about vineyard site selection has been compiled by Cornell University viticulturist Robert Pool and can be found at http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/hort/faculty/pool/NY Site-Soils/SiteSelection.html. Wolf's vineyard selection site is located at http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/viticulture/463-016/463-016.html.> Vinifera site selection has become more of an issue for growers and winemakers because table wine consumption is expanding in the premium and super-premium categories. Also, in the last 23 years, the number of wineries in New York has increased from 10 to over 125. Winemakers have always used American grape varieties like Concord and Niagara, which are native to New York, to make popularly-priced dessert and sparkling wines. The native varieties combine disease, insect, cold and acid soil tolerance, but are no longer in as great demand as the pricier vinifera, which are harder to grow and more sensitive to environmental conditions.

"If a grower wants to situate a new planting of Riesling grapes in New York, for instance, he will have a much better chance if he uses our mapping system," said Seem. Bankers who provide the considerable investment required to expand also tend to be more comfortable with scientific maps than guesswork.

"From a standpoint of new vineyard investments, you can save yourself a lot of time and money if you have the ability to pinpoint high quality production sites," said Dave Peterson, winemaker and grower relations manager for Swedish Hill Vineyard.

Good site information is not only required for vinifera. According to Seem, "Every grower has superior and more restrictive areas on his farm. Growers need to understand how well their different fields rank in terms of climatic or soil limitations."

The advent of GIS technology has allowed researchers to handle site selection factors at a greater resolution and flexibility than ever before. GIS databases are spatial databases that enable the storage and rapid analysis of vast quantities of geographic information. Researchers expanded and capitalized on present information, and combined the system with other computer programs that predict and interpolate weather data at the local level to provide growers with more and better information about vineyard siting than has been possible in the past.

In the current project, Magarey and Seem obtained digital maps of climate, soil and land use from ZedX Inc. (a commercial weather information company) that were derived from interpolating data from North American weather stations and adjusted for the influence of elevation. The maps with the greatest impact for New York grape growers are those showing extreme cold temperatures and the length of the frost-free season.