VineyardVitals update — 6 disease models, 14 indices, 8 data sources
Posted here back in February about VineyardVitals, the weather analytics platform I’ve been building for wine growers. A lot has shipped since then, so wanted to give a full update on where it’s at.
The basic idea is the same — you connect a weather station (or use free satellite data), and it does all the viticultural math for you daily, so you stop maintaining ugly spreadsheets.
Here’s everything it does now:
Growing season tracking
GDD in both °F and °C, Huglin Index, Hall & Jones BEDD, Cool Night Index, diurnal range, length of growing season, hot days, heatwaves. Winkler region classification auto-computed. Year-over-year vintage comparison built in.
Dormancy & cold
Chill portions, chill hours, cold hardiness tracking (hours below -10°C and -12°C critical thresholds), frost dates, freeze risk. What you’d need after a cold event to assess winter injury.
Disease forecasting — 6 peer-reviewed models
- Powdery mildew (Gubler-Thomas, UC Davis)
- Downy mildew (Baldacci 3-10 rule)
- Botrytis bunch rot (Broome)
- Black rot (Spotts)
- Phomopsis cane & leaf spot (Erincik)
- Anthracnose (Ciliberti)
Each alert now opens a full disease briefing — pathogen profile, 30-day trend chart, today’s drivers from your station (wet leaf hours, precip windows, temp ranges), scouting signs to look for, and recommended spray actions calibrated to your current risk level. No more guessing what “HIGH (81)” means — you see exactly what’s driving it and what to do.
Varietal fit & solar
Daily solar accumulation, kWh/m²/day. Varietal suitability scoring for 15+ grape varieties matched against your site’s GDD/Huglin/BEDD. Tells you what will actually ripen in your microclimate.
8 data sources
Tempest, Ambient Weather, Davis WeatherLink, Weather Underground, Visual Crossing, Meteomatics, CSV import, and Open-Meteo satellite reanalysis (9km ECMWF resolution with historical data back to 1940, for any coordinates on earth — no hardware required).
Data quality
Four-tier confidence scoring on every metric so you know how much to trust the numbers when your station had an outage or spotty coverage.
Vintage log
Track phenological milestones and observations year to year — budbreak, bloom, véraison, harvest dates, spray records, notes.
Free tier still covers basic season totals for one site. Pro ($20/mo) unlocks full daily analytics, all 6 disease models, chill tracking, and historical comparison. Pro+ ($50/mo) for unlimited sites and multi-provider access.
Same beta offer as before — if you work with this kind of data and would help me test it, sign up free and message me, I’ll comp you a year of Pro.
Thanks,
Nick