The integrated vineyard management company launched its new mobile app in September, enabling precision viticulture in the field with the use of site-specific data, including crop sampling, maturity analysis, and vine health and weather station stats, layered with localised and historic weather and harvest information. The data is then presented in insight-rich dashboards on the app, Tracy says.
“It’s like having a viticultural advisor in your pocket because the information’s available on your mobile phone or tablet in the field through an instant data sync.” Users can also log observations in the vineyard in real time, and forward those observations, including photos, where they require follow-up.
Developed with longstanding customers, Vinea provides both labour and crop management in one platform, as well as third-party data integrations and geographic information system maps.
For example, Vinea can show changes in unproductive vine counts for pruning and replanting decisions as well as increased accuracy in yield estimation, now with the ability to conduct vine audits on your mobile phone in the field.”
Vinea also calculates yield estimates compared to targets and actual tonnage through Vintrace integration, tracks soil moisture through a new Sentek soil probe integration, and keeps tabs on phenology, compared to historical data and long-term averages, Tracy says.
“It’s about using data better to improve profitability, productivity and sustainability.”
The mobile app was launched at the same time as a rebrand and the announcement that Vinea has become the inaugural sponsor of VineFacts, a weather and disease-management newsletter for the New Zealand wine industry. Produced for New Zealand Winegrowers by Victoria Raw at the Bioeconomy Science Institute, the resource started as a disease management programme in Marlborough in the 1990s, and has grown into a national climate and phenological database. It’s an ideal partnership, Tracy says.
“As Vinea brings vineyard and ecosystem data together into one centralised platform to derive more insights, we use much of the data VineFacts provides. As our new logo says, we ‘turn data into wine’.”
