For centuries, human eyes have selected overripe grapes for sauternes. Human hands turn champagne bottles daily. That might, indeed, be the outcome of technological changes sweeping through California's wine country, where growers desperately want to do a better job of separating the good grapes from the mediocre, even if that means winemaking has to become a more digital endeavor. Mr. Camera, therefore, is working with Vestra on a geographic information system to take to a whole new level the Excel spreadsheets he had been manually maintaining on soil, irrigation, and other factors. The database, called GIS, works with a Global Positioning System to provide exceptionally accurate pictures of the land.
Computers can make more sense of it.
It'll be a while before Mr. Camera can use GIS in all Hess's vineyards. In the near term, he hopes to use it to make sense of 14 years' of wine-tasting notes compiled at the Mount Veeder property. Up a ways on Highway 29, Robert Mondavi Winery has twice collaborated with NASA's Ames Research Center on vineyard issues. Back in 1993, Mondavi participated in a project to understand the impact of phylloxera, a louse that attacks the roots of grapevines. Using remote sensing technology, digital cameras snapped multispectral photographs of the vineyards from 15,000 feet, using visible and near-infrared light.