ABSTRACT
Proper site selection, historically, has been one of the most important aspects of fine wine production. Decades, and in some cases, centuries of experience with climate-topography-soil combinations allowed vintners around the world to identify areas that are most suitable for a given variety of winegrapes. Recent research and technology have considerably simplified the site-selection process (Gladstones, 1992). At the same time, wine production has evolved from stemming “out of passion” to a production management system. Large capital investments in viticulture now dictate that maximum potential of the entire vineyard be exploited, paying proper attention to marginal areas (Bramley and Proffitt, 1999). Winegrape yield as well as various measures of wine quality have been shown to vary substantially within a single block (Lamb, 1999). Inability to characterize such variability often leads to poor yield prediction and the acceptance of lower-quality wines from whole vineyards. Current management practices tend to follow the “average” approach, i.e., managing entire blocks with one prescription. In this context, precision viticulture (PV) may be defined as monitoring and managing spatial variation in productivity-related variables such as yield and quality within a single vineyard (Cook et al., 2000). To be an economically viable tool, PV should provide not only information to the vineyard managers about the performance of the cropping system over a variable land surface but also control technology to manage variations more precisely.
