Author: Nuno Ramilo from Ramilo Wines
In this article, Nuno Ramilo from Ramilo Wines shares his expertise on precision viticulture and quality wine production. As a pilot partner in the SmartVitiNet project, Ramilo Wines contributes both by providing some of its vineyards for field studies and by sharing its knowledge to explore ways to enhance the value of this technology for agricultural use.
What is a quality wine?
Wine production is one of the most ancient activities of civilization. It is deeply connected to the evolution of the most important civilizations across history in the Mediterranean geographical area.
Despite the first traces of wine production dating back to 8000 years ago, it is during the XIV century that viticulture is spread across the world. The globalization movement of the European vineyard varieties will start a chain of events that, eventually, will change the viticulture challenges dramatically. In fact, during the XIX century, several vineyard diseases brought accidentally from America will affect most of the European vineyards planted at the time, resulting in the near extinction of wine production in Europe. From that moment on, the grape growers were forced to overcome a significantly higher number of obstacles, every year, to be able to produce wine in economically viable ways.
The standardization and mechanization of some of the viticulture processes, as well as the appearance of a wide range of chemical products during the XXth century, brought the possibility of unprecedented yields in grape growing at a higher scale. These changes made wine available worldwide, at a price level never seen before. It is fair to say that wine has emerged, nowadays, as the greatest and most important drink in the world.
However, recent research and knowledge have suggested that some of the methods and products generally used in conventional viticulture raise questions in terms of environmental sustainability, as well as human health. Climate changes and the conscious awareness of consumers that what they eat and drink will have an important role in their well-being and ageing life quality are changing the way people look into grape growing and winemaking.
The consumer’s demand for natural, authentic and sustainable products will be the major driver of the evolution of viticulture in the future. It is no longer possible to produce quality wine, by today’s standards, using high-scale and conventional viticulture methods. Sustainable viticulture is an inevitable path to achieve quality but will raise several challenges for high-scale producers and vineyards located in humid areas.
Precision Viticulture will be a major tool for grape growers to achieve economically viable yields producing high-quality grapes, using reduced levels of chemical products and mechanical interventions on the vineyards.
Photo credit:ramilowines.com
What is Precision Viticulture?
According to OIV’s definition, Precision Viticulture is a cyclic management approach to field operations based on information and technology tools that use multiple sources of vineyard-related data to support site-specific decision-making with the aim of optimizing production processes.
In other words, Precision Viticulture allows grape growers to divide their vineyards in relatively homogeneous plots, according to the type of soil, sun exposure, topography and microclimate. Using modern technology, it is possible to monitor, in real-time, the state of each individual plot of the vineyard and, using the collected data, and adapt production processes to each of those individual plots.
ADVID, a Portuguese cluster for vine and wine modernization, estimates that the implementation of these strategies will allow agricultural productivity to be improved by more than 20%, through the reduction of water and fertilizer consumption and, consequently, the contamination of groundwater, contributing to more ecological and sustainable agriculture. These developing technologies include automation, such as the use of data obtained from drones/satellites, and should simultaneously be put into practice with the use of Big Data and of artificial intelligence.
The use of drones in Precision Viticulture
Drones will play a key role in Precision Viticulture in the future, as they allow for multiple applications and provide a wide range of information that allows grape growers to have a precise assessment of the soil and the vine’s condition.
The use of multispectral cameras in drones will make it possible to detect water stress, disease contamination, such as powdery and downy mildew, as well as other common vineyard issues, before a visual inspection. This will allow the grape growers to take action before yield losses occur, and to do it specifically on critical points of the vineyard, this way optimizing the usage of resources and contributing to a more sustainable and chemical-free product.
Drone spraying will also help the grape growers to optimize the sprayed areas of the vineyard, doing it in a more efficient way, and on the actual spots that need spraying, according to the data collected by the monitorization of the vineyard.
Conclusion
Climate changes and consumer demand for authentic and sustainable products are pushing the grape growing activity towards a higher consciousness about the integration of vineyards in a wider ecological system. The quality of the wines is now intimately connected to the pure and natural flavors of sustainably grown grapes. This is bringing challenges to the grape-growing industry that have never been faced in the past.
Precision viticulture is one of the most important tools to respond to these challenges, mitigating possible production losses, maintaining high standards of quality and authenticity in grapes and wines, and contributing to a lower impact on the ecosystems around the vineyards.
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