Perched high atop Pritchard Hill, Ovid Napa Valley's vineyard boasts a majestic view of Northern California's wine country. From the front of the property, you can see all the way to the Mayacamas Mountains that divide Napa and Sonoma counties. This breathtaking tableau is lost for the moment on Thibaut Scholasch, who's crouched in the vineyard, gently parting clusters of blueberry-sized cabernet sauvignon grapes. "This is a pipe," he says, holding a vine between his thumb and forefinger. "Water flows right underneath the surface."
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We all learned in grade school how a plant conveys water and nutrients to its extremities. But Scholasch, who holds a PhD in grape growing, understands this distribution process far more intimately. With this particular vine he knows precisely how much water is flowing in the pipe at any given moment. That's because he can see inside.
Scholasch tugs on a section of Velcro and peels back a layer of insulation, revealing a sap-flow sensor. About 3 inches long, it's a simple device consisting of a heating element, two thermometers, and a transmitter. "There are two wires that measure the temperature, one before the heat is applied and one after," he says. The difference between the readings indicates the amount of water present. The system, while simple, is powerful enough to unravel thousands of years of farming practices.
Scholasch and fellow French expat Sébastien Payen are cofounders of a small Oakland-based consultancy called Fruition Sciences. The company deploys arrays of sensors like this one to monitor dozens of vineyards around the world, the majority of them here in Napa Valley. Powered by solar panels, the systems wirelessly transmit readings over the Internet to the cloud, where they're analyzed to determine the plant's level of hydration. The scores are correlated with various external data, including weather, date, berry sugar content, soil moisture, and vine arrangements. Using all this information, Fruition advises clients about optimal planting schemes and irrigation schedules and predicts the best harvest dates.
This type of real-time monitoring and analysis may be increasingly common in Fortune 500 supply chains and smart electricity grids, but in agriculture it still counts as radical. To this day, farmers rely primarily on observation and instinct for everything from planting and fertilizing schemes to watering schedules. According to a USDA survey, more than three-quarters of American farmers irrigate based on observable crop conditions, like the way a leaf shrivels in heat. Nearly 7 percent simply irrigate when their neighbors do. The result is massive overwatering. This holds for Napa Valley as well. For some of the wineries they work with, Scholasch and Payen have already reduced overall water consumption by more than 10 million gallons a season.
>Napa's grape whisperers will be reluctant to change their century-old methods just because two Frenchmen show up with water sensors.
Of course, whenever hard data invades the realm of intuition, conflict is sure to follow. The establishment and the geeks have already scuffled in sports, advertising, medicine, policing, and real estate. And so it goes here in wine country. For the past 100 years, the farming decisions—planting, pruning, irrigating, and harvesting—have been dictated by experience and often even a degree of mysticism. This is the land of grape whisperers. And many of Napa's elite are not going to change the methods that have proven themselves for a century just because a couple of Frenchmen show up with water sensors.
But to a growing cadre of A-list winemakers, there's actionable intelligence in the data. Many of Fruition's clients are altering their irrigation techniques, turning laggard vineyards into top performers and using far less water than they ever imagined. Along the way they're extracting lessons that could extend far beyond this rarified corner of agriculture. By gaining insight into the relationships between water, sunlight, yield, and taste, Fruition Sciences is showing the way for farmers of all stripes to increase productivity and quality in a world of shifting weather patterns and decreasing supplies of freshwater.
Fruition's Office overlooks a knockoff Jiffy Lube in a gritty section of Oakland's Temescal district. Scholasch is the wine expert. He moved to the US in 1999 after earning a master's degree in winemaking from Montpellier SupAgro, one of France's top agronomy schools, landing a job as a research viticulturist for Napa's legendary Robert Mondavi. His English was minimal at the time, and he learned the language mostly from Mexican field hands. Studying the relationship between irrigation and fruit composition, he quickly recognized how little anyone knew about what was happening in their vineyards. "I was amazed to realize that so many winemaking or vineyard decisions were being made based on empiricism or unreliable deductions made from observations," he says.
Scholasch traveled the world working as a consulting winemaker for several years but found himself drawn far more to decoding the mysteries in the vineyards than to crafting the perfect cabernet. He felt that he was a scientist among artists. Hardly one to romanticize Napa Valley, he primarily drinks what he can buy at Trader Joe's. In 2005 he returned to France to pursue a PhD in viticulture. He'd persuaded five iconic Napa wineries—Dana Estates, Ovid, Napa Valley Reserve, Roy Estate, and Vineyard 29—to foot the bill for his studies in exchange for using their vineyards as test beds. In 2006, a mutual friend introduced Scholasch to Payen, now Fruition's numbers guy. At the time, Payen, who has a PhD in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley, was looking to commercialize custom sensors that measured fruit sugar content. The two realized they could combine their skills to measure water—and get a better picture of how grapevines are doing. In 2007 they launched their self-funded company, focusing on boutique wineries and using off-the-rack sensors to keep costs down.
Data From Vines
To monitor a grapevine's water needs, Fruition Sciences uses sensors to measure sap flow. Here's how it works.
—Victoria Tang
Held in place with Velcro, this orange sleeve applies heat to the stem.
These take temperature readings at the stem surface just before and after the heat is applied. The differential in the readings reflects how much water is pumping through the vine.
Shields against external sources of heat (mostly sunshine) that could interfere with accurate measurements.
This wire connects to a solar-powered data logger, which transmits real-time information anywhere in the world.
Photo: Joe Pugliese
Fruition charges a grape grower $10,000 a season for two monitoring stations, analysis, and upkeep (or as little as $1,000 for tests and consultations without real-time monitoring). Ovid, with eight stations last year, is one of its biggest customers. Ovid's second-generation winemaker, Austin Peterson, is one of Fruition's most vocal supporters and attests to changes the sensor arrays can produce. "Before, irrigation management was basically done by our vineyard foreman looking at next week's weather forecast and at leaves that were starting to fold or tendrils that were drying," Peterson says. "But visual cues can be misleading. As we started to see the data, it started to explain some things."
Before becoming a convert, Peterson needed to see proof. In 2007 he divided Ovid's 15-acre property in half, using the visual method on one side, sensors on the other. Following traditional visual cues led to a regimen of shallow irrigations, which required more water and resulted in unintended side effects, like shriveled grapes and elevated alcohol levels. It also may have helped slow the ripening process and delay the harvest, which is always risky in Northern California, where early autumn rains can destroy a crop in a matter of days. Meanwhile, data gathered from the sensors dictated a near-opposite approach: fewer, deeper irrigations, primarily later in the season. After two years, the result was substantial water savings and earlier harvests. For Peterson, the experiment shed light on how profoundly irrigation affects fruit quality as well as a wine's flavors and bouquet. "It was like going from having an undergraduate degree in something to a PhD, where you have a deep understanding of why vines behave the way they do," Peterson says. "As a winemaker, you understand different flavors. But now you start to understand why the differences exist."
Napa Valley's oldest wineries were established in the mid-1800s. Its pioneers took their cues from the finest French producers, like those on Bordeaux's famed Left Bank, where winemaking dates back to the 12th century. There, frequent summer rains provide ample groundwater and allow vineyard managers to pack their fields tightly with vines. So the early Napa farmers planted their fields in a similar manner. "They assumed that if you copied and pasted the best vineyards, they would produce the best fruits," Scholasch says.
But Napa isn't Bordeaux. Soil composition and sunlight differ, and it typically rains very little in Napa between May and October. Certain grape varieties in certain parts of the world are dry-farmed, meaning the only water supply is Mother Nature. But not Napa's famed cabernet. Here farmers have historically hacked the climate to make it resemble France's, faking early rain to provide vigor, trimming the leaf canopy to gain sunlight, and packing the vines closely together. "We could go without irrigation entirely if we had been smarter about configuration and planting density," Scholasch says. "Applying the wrong sets of rules set up a need for irrigation."
Over-irrigating a vineyard isn't just wasteful; it's counterproductive. To understand why, there are a few important things to remember about grapes, especially the varieties used to create high-quality wine. First, they grow on vines, which require support to reach sunlight. Once the vines encounter light and water, they enter the so-called vegetative state and sprout leaves. But when resources are scarce, the vines become stressed and rush ahead to the reproductive state, ripening berries in hopes of escaping to a more resourceful area by way of a bird. That's why many of the finest wines are produced by vines planted in rocky, nutrient-poor hillsides with good drainage. The desperate vines focus much of their energy on the berries from the get-go and so reach optimal ripeness more quickly. The last thing to know: Unlike elsewhere in agriculture, bigger fruit isn't the goal. Water provides girth—and that's bad. Since the skin provides most of the flavor, it's far better to have pea-sized berries with a high ratio of skin to flesh.
This is why Fruition may advise clients to deny water early and irrigate deeply once ripening is well under way. At that point, the vine focuses its nutrients on flavoring the fruit. The Frenchmen also sometimes recommend not irrigating before heat spikes or at the first sign of wilting; this advice can be especially hard to take. We all see a droopy leaf and conclude that the plant must be thirsty, but watering at that point actually undermines the complex mechanisms a vine uses to conserve resources and can even cause shriveling. "People think that the plant kingdom behaves like us," Scholasch says. "But plants aren't designed to tell the human eye what they need. They have over 400 million years of evolution on us and very subtle ways of coping with heat and water regulation."
Vineyard managers often bristle at how the Frenchmen say a farm should look. "A lot of the vineyards, it's like pretty dresses. They look perfect, not one leaf out of row and it's all green and beautiful," Payen says. "But most vineyards that are making quality wines are going to have yellow leaves later in the year. They'll look like they're suffering."
For some clients, like Daniel Baron, winemaker for the renowned Silver Oak Cellars, the counterintuitive advice has been a revelation. "As farmers, we tend to baby our plants in the early season. The farmer tends to irrigate too soon, cut it off too soon, and pick too early," Baron says. Despite having more than 40 vintages to his credit, using the data-driven system has given him new confidence. "Anything that tells us the vines are going to be OK is a tremendous tool."
None of Fruition's customers signed on expressly to save water, but it's a common side effect. Many of the wineries pump from unmetered wells, aquifers, or lakes, so they don't know precisely how much water they use, but everyone claims that it's far less now. "We're down maybe as much as 75 percent," says Kale Anderson, winemaker for Cliff Lede Vineyards in Napa's Stags Leap district. Another client, Dana Estates, uses sensors on five 2-acre parcels. On one of those plots, the winery reduced irrigation from a range of 36 to 64 gallons per vine annually to 0 to 10 gallons. Dana's director of production, Cameron Vawter, sees the potential for dramatic overall cuts. "We could save 5.8 million gallons a year," he says.
Payen gets even more specific while charting Ovid's results for the 2008 and 2009 seasons. "From bud-break to harvest, the plants saved about 25 millimeters of water on a one-acre block. That's roughly equal to 26,700 gallons," he says.
According to a survey by Wine Business Monthly, 68 percent of North American wine-grape farmers don't use equipment to monitor their irrigation, implying that they rely largely on observation to make watering decisions. Of course every farmer's instincts are different, and no two face the same geographical conditions. But if Fruition's conclusions are to be believed, it's safe to assume that anyone relying on intuition is wasting water. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest just how much: There are roughly 500,000 acres of wine-grape vineyards in California. If 68 percent are being watered based on instinct alone, that's 340,000 acres. According to Payen, Ovid is saving 26,700 gallons of water per acre. Multiply those two numbers and you get 9.1 billion gallons of wasted water per season.
Scholasch and Payen are proud of the water conservation they've achieved and are perfectly willing to talk about the importance of efficient irrigation in an era of climate change. But it'd be a mistake to characterize them as hardcore conservationists. The entrepreneurs want to help their clients make better wine. It's a bit early to say how well they're doing in this regard. High-end cabernets spend years in the barrel before release, so most Fruition customers have yet to sell any wines produced under the consultancy's influence. The earliest clients, like Harlan Estate and Screaming Eagle, have made stellar wines while working with Fruition, but they generally produce stellar wines anyway.
Some telling signs are emerging, however. Cliff Lede's Anderson has found the sensors particularly useful in elevating underperforming portions of the estate. Guided by Fruition's data, he stopped watering one notoriously underachieving vineyard block. "We basically dry-farmed one block that had always been a C, to try to bring it up to an A-minus," he says. "It was the most stressed it's ever been and produced the highest-quality wine it's ever produced." Ovid's results have been even more impressive. The Wine Advocate, published by ubercritic Robert Parker, deemed Ovid's 2009 vintage—the first to fully incorporate Fruition's data—worthy of 96-plus points on a 100-point scale, one of the winery's highest marks ever.
Many winemakers, however, tend to be unconvinced—if not outright hostile. "For us, farming is about gut feeling, common sense, and the relationship we have with our properties," says Brad Grimes of Abreu Vineyard. Grimes has plenty of data to support his approach. Since 1997, Abreu has received six perfect 100-point scores from The Wine Advocate and consistent rankings of 95 and above. "We don't utilize any of those services, and we stay away from technology. What Fruition has done has been pretty radical. Maybe it's archaic and old-school, but I just have a problem with having so much data. There's a scientific part to their business that I just can't align myself with."
Others are less diplomatic. "I farm in the old-fashioned way, and I win the races," says Jayson Woodbridge, owner and winemaker of Hundred Acre, Cherry Pie, Layer Cake, and others. Every year since 2004, Hundred Acre cabernets, which routinely sell out upon release at up to $500 a bottle, have scored 96 points or better from The Wine Advocate, including a perfect 100 in 2007. Even his lower-end Layer Cake, which sells for less than $15, often scores in the low 90s. Woodbridge thinks anyone following Fruition's counsel is asking for trouble: "If they're going to tell me that giving the plants water before it gets hot is wrong, they can blow me. When you're in a vineyard and it's 120 degrees, all the leaves are turning upside down. They shut down."
Nevertheless, Fruition is continuing to make inroads—even in the old world, where traditions have much deeper roots. Four of Bordeaux's premier wineries have signed on. Irrigation is expressly forbidden in Bordeaux, but the clients still want to understand how their vines use water. And one of the world's most influential winemakers, Michel Rolland, is a Fruition champion. Rolland, who advises more than 100 wineries and owns several outright, recently contracted with Fruition to deploy sensors on his personal vineyard in Mendoza, Argentina. "I met Scholasch almost 10 years ago. I follow his research because my goal is not to make a decent wine with bad grapes but to produce the best grapes possible," Rolland says. "Sap-flow sensors are not making wine, but they are giving us better control of the vines. Of course, we can do things like we did before, with our own feeling, but somebody who is not able to change his mind will not be successful in the long term."
When Scholasch and Payen wrote the original business plan for Fruition Sciences, they focused on the world that Scholasch knew, figuring that boutique wineries could afford an early-adopter tax to prove the technology. In 2010 they expanded to wineries that sell bottles for less than $100. And the plan is to expand at some point beyond wine altogether. After all, growing high-end wine grapes may present a unique set of challenges, but all farmers can gain from knowing precisely what's happening inside their crops. (Marijuana cultivation is especially analogous to winemaking, according to Scholasch, because pot's potency, like wine's flavor and bouquet, is a direct result of irrigation techniques.)
To that end, Scholasch occasionally speaks to nonwine audiences. One autumn day he gave a talk to an auditorium of grad students at New York University's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. He walked them through the basics of the sensor arrays and some of the early results. After the address, the center's director at the time, Michael Purugganan, who has a $3.65 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study how water affects rice at the genomic level, enthusiastically endorsed Scholasch's efforts. "I'd love to get my hands on this kind of data to see what's going on with rice," he says. "If you want to understand what's going on in a plant, you have to understand water."
Purugganan is not alone. Fruition's sensors are manufactured by Dynamax, which has begun selling similar devices for use on other crops. University researchers are deploying sap-flow sensors to help grow soybeans, grapefruit, apples, pears, and pecans. Others are using the sensors to monitor trees in urban environments.
Scholasch left winemaking partly out of boredom and partly out of frustration. A scientist among artists, he yearned to have a greater impact on the world. Fruition has been shaking things up in the Napa Valley, but the rampant skepticism and fear of data has clearly jaded him, and he often expresses irritation at the resistance and even, at times, name-calling.
So you'd think that the endorsement of a high-profile rice scientist, along with the interest showed by the broader agricultural world, would invigorate him. But back in Oakland, Scholasch lowers his eyes and shakes his head. "The first sap-flow sensors were tested in the '80s. What we have in place was usable in the early '90s—and look, it's taken 20 years to start using it," he says, then gives a quick smile, betraying a glimmer of hope. "But it's very rewarding to get recognition from peers you respect. It's an accreditation."
Or at the very least a toast to the long road ahead.
Jeffrey M. O'brien (@jeffreyobrien) wrote about Weight Watchers' new point system in issue 20.01.
