170 Decades of Data-Driven Improvements “You can make good wine or bad wine with good grapes,” Leal da Costa likes to say, “but you can’t make good wine with bad grapes.” His background in soil fertility and plant nutrition includes work with a lab located in Fort Wayne, Indiana that prides itself on having scientists who don’t mind getting dirty. He would send soil samples from Spain and Portugal and get results that improved production quality. “It was quite a revolution because we didn’t sell fertilizers, we sold ideas,” Leal da Costa said. In this work, he helped farmers growing grapes, olives, and other produce. His passion for viticulture, and the geographic approach, led him to Symington. There he has concentrated on improving the fertility of the soil with a focus on quality grapes rather than abundance. “A big amount does not produce the best results,” Leal da Costa said. “You make the most money when you have perfect grapes, and you produce the best wine.” To make the grapes better, detailed management plans are adapted to each location. Approaches differ for sites that are too humid or too dry, and for different soil profiles. The maps inform the field work. “We know what to do in each place and more or less when,” Leal da Costa said. “We have all the information, and we know the results and where we are spending our time.” Developing Research Wineries and a Library of Resilient Grape Varieties With five generations of port making in Portugal, Symington Family Estates has a strong commitment to the uniqueness of the growing conditions and the grapes that make port wine. The company set aside a vineyard in 1997 for research to dive more deeply into the science and to experiment with planting and identifying the best varieties to use for each of its 27 vineyards. Since then, two more research sites have been planted at different altitudes to account for all the conditions in the Douro River Valley. The vineyards contain 53 grape varieties (29 red and 24 white), with careful attention paid to providing equal conditions for all grapes to conduct meaningful comparisons with the help of researchers from various universities. The aim Details about the juice from the grapes gets added in the app to tie taste to place.
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