Alone on the tractor, alone at the press, alone with the secateurs
Much of the work on a small vineyard is solitude. The best thinking happens in row seven and almost none of it survives. What we are building in Elf to change that.
Blog
Field notes from a 0.22 ha vineyard in Poland: frost automation, disease models, sensors and the day-to-day of running a small vineyard on real data.
How to start a winery when you don't live there
Starting a vineyard and winery 100 km from home, on weekends and holidays, with a job and kids. What we got right, what we got wrong, and how other absentee growers around the world handle it.
The EU wine e-label obligation, and why it reaches Australian producers
Since December 2023 every wine sold in the EU needs an ingredient list and nutrition info, most of it behind a QR code. What stays on the glass, what the word "Ingredients" is for, and why exporting to the EU makes this an Australian problem too.
AI measures vine water stress in Napa. What does a small vineyard get out of it?
A summary of an Inside Winemaking episode with Elias Fernandez (Shafer Vineyards, Napa) plus commentary: why an AI water-management tool (Tule) barely
Autonomous tractors in New Zealand. What does a small vineyard get out of it?
A summary of an AWRI podcast on vineyard automation (David Allen, Pernod Ricard NZ) with commentary: why the Oxin autonomous tractor won't scale down
Vineyard paperwork, EU vs Australia: what changes if you move to the southern hemisphere
EU electronic treatment records, cellar registers and PDO rules compared with Australia's Label Integrity Program, AWRI spray diary and WET.
How AI is rewriting the vineyard weather forecast
The classic forecast gives one number for tomorrow night. Google DeepMind's WeatherNext generates dozens of scenarios and turns frost and spray decisi
EU electronic spray records from 2027: what winegrowers need to know
From 2027 the EU requires plant protection product records to be electronic and machine-readable, with no area threshold. What changes, who it covers,
Leaf sensor - first steps
We're building our own sensor to monitor the microclimate right at the vine leaf - where fungal disease risk is actually decided. AHT15, LoRa, cloud i
BBCH growth stages - why every winemaker should know them
The BBCH scale is an international system of plant growth stages. Knowing your vines' stage lets you make better decisions about protection, irrigatio
Our sprinklers watered the lawn during a downpour - the culprit was a clogged rain gauge
For three weeks in July our irrigation watered the lawn almost every night - even when 18 mm of rain fell. The weather station said it was dry. How a
Before VineyardElf, there was a frost-protection script - the story of our side project
VineyardElf started as a box of electronics screwed to a post in our vineyard - an OpenSprinkler controller and a frost-protection script. Here's how