If you run a vineyard management company, you might be familiar with scattered spreadsheets, photos in numerous camera rolls, and each season’s data spread between multiple folders. Multiply that across ten or twenty client vineyards, and you’ll find that the time it takes to coordinate everything starts to eat into the time you should be spending in the vineyard.
Vineworks is a UK-based vineyard management consultancy responsible for the planting, maintenance, and profitability of multiple vineyard sites all over the UK. Tom Reid, their Head of Vineyard Services, manages operations across all of those sites. We spoke to him about how his team use Sectormentor to streamline their team coordination; from daily scouting, through to the big pruning decisions that shape each vineyard’s productivity and yield.
One platform for every site
For a company managing multiple vineyard clients, each with different varieties, terroirs, and priorities, you need a tool that is flexible and customisable, designed for multi-person use, and works out in the field with no signal and muddy hands.
What Vineworks needed was a platform they could shape to fit their operation rather than the other way around. As Tom puts it:
“We were looking for something really simple, and really customisable at the same time. With Sectormentor’s help we’ve been able to customise it, but still keep the simplicity of a data entry app, which is critical for us.”
A vineyard management tool has to fit into everyone’s schedules; if it requires training, workarounds, or needs your team to collect metrics they don’t find useful, it starts to take time out of everyone’s day. Vineworks cherry-pick the metrics that matter for each client and each season, keeping data entry fast and the outputs immediately useful.
Full visibility on every vineyard, from field to office
In multi-site vineyard management, no single person can be everywhere at once; Vineworks has scouts in the vineyards throughout the week, recording observations, photographing canopy development, and flagging issues as they find them. The challenge is ensuring that key information reaches the rest of the team promptly and in a format that is easy to interpret.
Sectormentor’s map layout gives the team a spatial view of each vineyard; detailing what was recorded and where. Tom describes using the bird’s-eye view to check whether his scouting practice was representative of the whole site:
“The map update makes it much, much easier for us to scout a vineyard quickly and effectively. We can look at the map and see how representative we’re being when we walk a vineyard, because you get a bird’s-eye view of yourself moving through the field.”
Back in the office, anyone on the team can review the latest observations without having to chase someone for an update. Photos, data, and notes from that morning’s scouting are already synced and uploaded into the system, organised by site:
“Our scouts will walk a vineyard, take lots of photos and make lots of observations. In the team time, back in the office someone else can click through, and we have a really good overview of all of our vineyards, all at once. Depending on what we’re looking at, we can dive in a bit deeper, or we can see simple trends, like ‘everywhere seems to be flowering around now.’ It allows different people to get eyes on all sorts of elements of the vineyards that we look after.”
For Vineworks, Sectormentor helps the team to spot patterns early across all of their vineyards and get organised about pruning and harvest planning. When everyone is working from the same picture, the quality of decision-making improves and the time spent chasing updates goes down.
How pruning decisions get made in December
A crucial moment where both data and team coordination determine the shape of the next three months is the planning window before pruning begins in January. At Vineworks, the team come together to collectively assess each vineyard and how to prune it.
In the weeks before Christmas, the Vineworks team visit each site to carry out winter assessments; they record bud counts and charge counts in particular, which tells them how many buds to keep on each vine to balance yield and quality for the coming season (see Sectormentor’s Vine Health Indicator). Where possible, they’re also collecting pruning weight data, which gives a measure of the vines’ vigour and helps inform how much to prune. All of this contributes towards a collaborative planning session that sets the schedule for January onwards:
“Before Christmas we do all of our planning for pruning. The team will be out doing their winter assessments for the vineyards. At this stage we’re looking at what degree of pruning we’re going to do to each site, which can become quite a collaborative moment. We discuss the results of these assessments (pruning weights, charge counts etc.) and plan out what type of pruning we’re going to do at each vineyard, which then dictates the schedule for our pruning and has a really big impact on our next three months of work. It’s really critical for us to have data that’s easy to interpret, and then we can make a plan accordingly.”
When each vineyard’s data is all in one place, comparable across sites, easy to pull up and interrogate together, the team can focus on the decisions themselves; which vineyards need conservative pruning, which can carry more buds, and how to allocate team members across the full schedule.
For a consultancy whose reputation depends on getting those decisions right for every client, the planning infrastructure behind them matters as much as the viticulture knowledge that informs them.
If you’re running a multi-site vineyard operation and want to explore whether Sectormentor fits the way your team works, get in touch at info@vidacycle.com.
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