Climatic records and within field data on yield and harvest quality over a whole vineyard estate

Abstract

Detailed and precise knowledge of production parameters (yield, quality, health status, etc.) in agriculture is the basis for analyzing the effect of any agricultural practice. Fine mapping of production parameters makes it possible to identify the origin of observed variability, whether associated with environmental factors or with agricultural practices. In viticulture, in real commercial context, these data are rare because monitoring systems embedded on harvesting machines for grape yield and quality are not yet available. As a result, they are costly and/or cumbersome to acquire manually. As an alternative, a research project has been proposed to test low-cost methods using GNSS tracking devices for yield and harvest quality mapping in viticulture. The data set was acquired as part of this research. The methodology was applied on a commercial vineyard of 30 ha during the whole 2022 harvest season. The method has identified harvest sectors (HS) associated to measured production parameters (grape mass and harvest quality parameters: sugar content, total acidity, pH, yeast assimilable nitrogen, organic nitrogen) and calculated production parameters (potential alcohol of grapes, yield, yield per plant, percentage of unproductive plants) over the entire vineyard. The grape mass was measured at the vineyard cellar or at the wine-growing cooperative by calibrated scales. The harvest quality parameters were measured from samples on grape must at a commercial laboratory specialized in oenological analysis (Institut Coopératif du Vin, Montpellier, France) with standardized protocols. The percentage of unproductive plants of a harvest sector was calculated from the manually geolocation of each unproductive plants (dead plants + missing plants) over the entire vineyard, the plantation density of blocks, and the geolocalization of the harvest sector. The mean area of these harvest sectors is 0.3 ha. The data set is supplemented by climatic data from a weather station deployed in the center of the vineyard. It provided three climatic parameters (relative humidity, rainfall, air temperature) every 15 min, for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 years. It was also supplemented by a complete description of the vineyard blocks (grape variety, plantation year, area, inter-row distance and vine distance). The proposed data set constitutes a unique and interesting resource for research in agronomy, vine ecophysiology and remote sensing. It can be used for any research in vine ecophysiology aimed at identifying potential relationships between yield and harvest quality parameters for different grape varieties. The data set only covers one year, which is a limitation for studying inter-annual variability of the parameters measured. Another limitation of the method concerns the footprint (0.3 ha on average) of the parameters measured.