Grape growers will now have all the most up-to-date information about weather conditions and the state of vines around the Mudgee region, thanks to five new weather stations positioned in local vineyards.
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A grant secured by the Mudgee Wine Grape Growers Association’s Wine and Viticulture committee has funded the installation of five weather stations in the vineyards of Logan Wines, Yeates Wines, Gooree Park, Woodbrook and Robert Stein.
Mudgee is only the second region in Australia to implement the system, which has been funded by the The Grape and Wine Research Development Corporation and installed by the Australian Wine Research Institute.
Together, the five vineyards selected by the Australian Wine Research Institute represent each corner of the region, from Logan on the southern side of Mudgee through to Gooree’s vineyard towards Gulgong.
The weather stations are designed to measure attributes important to viticulture, such as rainfall, humidity and wind direction, and are equipped with a probe that extends into the vines to test conditions in the leaf canopy.
The stations, each worth around $5000, were installed a fortnight ago, and the project is already fully funded for the next three years.
Winemaker Jacob Stein, who leads the Grape Growers’ Wine and Viticulture committee, said the results would soon be accessible online to anyone interested in local weather conditions, and updated hourly.
“The AWRI will then be distributing VineWatch emails for monitoring events and suggestions for vineyard managements based on the weather stations’ data collected and forecasts,” Mr Stein said.
“Paul Baguley will be doing on-the-ground pest and disease vineyard monitoring and will report valuable information back to the AWRI.”
Mr Stein said the extra information, wider variety of sources and new details would be useful as soon as the results began to be published.
The measuring of sunlight and UV levels in the canopy would be useful in judging the grapes’ ripening, while other figures would help in pest and disease management.
The stations will also give a picture of the different conditions experienced around the region – for instance, Mr Stein said the southern side of town seemed to receive more rain, while the western vineyards were dryer and often a few degrees warmer than those closer to Mudgee.
