Integrated Techniques for Vineyard Variability Evaluation

European wine producers pay great attention to proper vine canopy management, mainly to improve final product quality, reducing yield fluctuation and creating the best microclimatic conditions for grape development. The success of these operations depends on a series of factors, like vine being and vineyard organisation, meteorological seasonal trend and phytosanitary course, workers capability and technical knowledge. A good management corresponds to a reduced variability in the vineyard but, on the other side, spatial variability is an inalienable element of natural and anthropic systems. Its knowledge and objective description represents a significant advantage in terms of field work rationalisation, resource use optimisation and quality improvement. Precision viticulture tries to answer to these exigencies, but his adaptation to European productive realities requires some further effort. The E.U. Project Bacchus has studied the potentiality of these methodologies in the automatic updating of cadastral information and in the support of vineyard management. One of the most interesting component of the Bacchus software is VIVES (VIneyard Variability Evaluation System), an extension integrating vine growing model, GIS, High Resolution Images, technical information and local knowledge for a detailed description of the variability in the vineyard. The preliminary results of the application of VIVES in two Italian Controlled Origin Denomination areas (Prosecco and Frascati), presented in this paper, are encouraging and suggest further improvements of the methodology.