Wacom Tablet Making the Wine Industry more Efficient

Geographic information systems (GIS) technology plays an important role in the wine industry.

The prestigious Chateau St. Michelle Wine Estates in Washington uses the combination of the Wacom DTZ-2100 interactive pen display with Esri software to display precision canopy density in the vineyard. The aerial imagery is converted to the NDVI format (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), which displays the photosynthetic output of plants, based on their spectral bands in aerial imagery. The DTZ-2100 pen’s accuracy makes it possible to pinpoint specific plants easily, so their fruit can be picked separately to take advantage of certain flavor characteristics.

“We’ve found a correlation between the size of the canopies and the grape flavors,” says Jennifer Smithyman of St. Michelle. “Many of our winemakers have preferences, such as grapes with more vegetal characteristics and others prefer more fruit flavors. Because the Wacom display allows our georeferencing to be so accurate, we can divide the vineyard into different zones for separate picking to give the winemakers what they want.”

“GIS is providing new insight into the importance of maps and is making industries like wine more targeted with resource allocation, which in turn leads to greater efficiency. This increased efficiency is especially important in these current economic times,” says Gabriel Schmidbauer, GIS professor at American Sentinel University.”

via directionsmag.com