The modern wine trade uses many techniques to ensure that its output is as high a quality as possible, but until now none of these techniques have been a product of the space age.
Data supplied by the European Space Agency (ESA) will now be able to help the European Commission-backed Bacchus programme chart Europe's vineyards in minute detail, a tool which will enable wine makers to improve production management and guarantee grape quality.
Europe has been unrelenting its is efforts to protect the names of its major wines, arguing that only grapes grown in each specific region can guarantee to produce a wine with all the characteristics consumers have come to expect.
A grape's distinctive flavour is derived from localised characteristics such as soil type, microclimate, altitude and the slope of the ground, and this why the Controlled Origin Denominations (Appellation d'Origine in France, Denominazione d'Origine Controllata in Italy, etc.) are so rigorously protected.
All wine-producing EU states must keep a register of vine production as a means of regulating the quality of the wines produced there, but there is no standardised way of doing this between Member States. At present, a combination of fieldwork, vine producer interviews and photo-interpretation of aerial photography is the most common way of updating the register.
This was why the Bacchus programme was set up by 14 public and private bodies from four wine-producing countries: Italy, France, Spain and Portugal.
"A strong point of the Bacchus consortium is the very complete range of involved users we have, covering different aspects of vine cultivation," said Manuel Bea of prime contractor Geosys.
"In Spain and Portugal the users are governmental organisations involved in applying EC policy, while in France and Italy users belong to the wine production sector. The French GeoDASEA offers technical support to grape producers at a regional level. The Italian users are consortia of the Controlled Origin Denomination areas for Prosecco and Frascati, and the last user is a private French organisation which federates 2200 wine co-operatives."
Bacchus will use geo-referenced aerial and satellite images to create a specialised geographical information system (GIS) tool for use in vine production. As well as enabling improved record keeping and statistics, this GIS tool will also help with land management. All relevant data on any given wine-growing region - vine inventories, administrative boundaries, slope angle relative to the Sun - can be integrated into GIS and made easily accessible to vineyard managers. Meteorological data can also be added to the system.
For improved vineyard management, all these distinct data sets can be digitally combined together - a process like overlaying maps on top of one another - to obtain new and useful information, such as locating optimal areas for particular vine types, or where best to expand a given Controlled Origin Denomination's boundaries, or conversely identifying the least productive land so it can be grubbed up.
French research institute Cemagref has the demanding role of developing pattern recognition technology for the automatic recognition of vineyards within satellite or aerial images.
"We have previous experience of image processing for agricultural applications," said Michel Deshayes of Cemagref. "For instance by textural analysis - automated recognition of distinctive structural elements - we have been able to distinguish weeds from crops on aerial images. We also worked on a robot that killed weeds with electricity to lessen use of pesticides, using leaf shape to identify weeds in close-up.
"For Bacchus our approach will be to combine both textural and shape information. At the scale of high-resolution satellite or aerial images, vineyard structure induces specific periodic patterns and spatial distributions."
The Bacchus project began earlier this year with a survey of pilot sites, including Italy's Frascati vineyards, where vines have been cultivated since Roman times - now home to ESA's Earth Observation centre ESRIN. The sites are being regularly re-imaged to acquire data on how vineyards develop through the growing season.
High-resolution multispectral satellite images of up to 0.65 m resolution are being acquired, as well as aerial photographs at higher resolution still - simulating next generation Earth Observation satellite data soon to become available. The aerial cameras are fitted with GPS so their photos can be precisely geo-referenced for integration within GIS systems.
The Frascati Controlled Origin Denomination consortium represents some 700 grape producers and 30 wine makers in the area. "We know this project is the way to go in the future," said Fulvio Comandini of the consortium.
"Bacchus will give us - and all the other Controlled Origin Denominations across the country too - a customised information system to more precisely manage our entire system of production and also a fully objective means of guaranteeing the quality of our wine to the market."
For ESA, the Bacchus project represents the agency's first involvement in the emerging precision farming area, using Earth Observation data to improve agricultural efficiency.