A Little Bit of High-Tech in the Vineyard

Back in 1998 the year of our first planting, I invested in a simple hardware store max-min thermometer. It reset manually via passing a magnet over the previous maximum or minimum temperatures.  I tracked summer highs and the winter low, the last frost date in the spring and the first in the fall.  Sometimes I forgot to go out to the vineyard and reset the previous max or min, and lost track of a critical event.

 

Since then I’ve gotten to know Steve Arms.  He runs Microstrain, a very dynamic, local high-tech company.  His firm developed a very sophisticated instrumentation cluster, and he has installed two prototype sets in our vineyards.   One at Meach Cove (within a few hundred feet of Lake Champlain’s shore) and the other at our new planting site in Charlotte (more than a mile from the lake’s shore). The stations read not just temperature, but record and keep a history of temperature, humidity, leaf wetness, soil moisture and solar radiation.  The stations are connected to the internet so we can view the results from the comfort of our home computers…or cell phones.