Here at AV we've been working with some new soil-sampling equipment: our power probe and electromagnetic soil electrical conductivity sensor. We've taken data collected via these tools and integrated it with old-fashioned soil pit analysis. The result is a way to spatially view numerous aspects of soils. Check it out!  We can use this information to look varying levels of plant-available water in the rootzone.   We can also look at differences in organic matter percentage. These are just a few examples of the numerous soil characteristics we can analyze and present. These maps consolidate tables of numerical data into spatial maps that are easily interpreted by anyone - not only soil experts! Read this recent response from one of our clients: "The amount of information is incredible.  Very informative for a guy like me who doesn’t know much about the roles of different soil levels. The color map charts clearly show some mass differences throughout

Things certainly were looking up a few months ago. Harvest ended. Nothing in Sonoma or Napa caught fire. And we even got rain! A lot of it. Here in Windsor, we finished out 2021 just south of 20 inches of rain for the fall season. But then that was it. I may not have made it through dry January, but the weather did. Now we’re looking at a February that’s just as temperate. Roll the footage… We love our soil probes here at AV, so let’s take a look at how this year stacks up against its parched predecessor. Below is a Napa site. Now keep in mind, we had some rain in February of 2021, but as you can see the moisture reserves that we accumulated in the fall have left us exactly where we were last year, and that’s not a comforting place to be… Ditto in the Russian River Valley…  So is 2022 going to be just as hard? Yes and no. One of the major problems last year was running out of water. If you use surface water-fed ponds, the early rains w

If your vineyard has been declining and you can't seem to understand why, there's a chance it's your soil. You could be facing a simple nutritional imbalance, toxicity, or nematodes. Maybe you have an abrupt change in texture and water can't percolate more than a couple feet. Like all things, you don't know until you look. Here at AV we have some new toys...ahem...scientific equipment to help understand your own unique terroir.  Pictured above are our new Electromagnetic sensor (left) and Powerprobe (right).   We've been crawling into soil pits, taking samples, and writing reports for decades and frankly, we don't plan on stopping anytime soon. Pit locations are usually done at random in order to capture the total picture. Often this results in a bunch of pits that look similar and have similar test results.  By using the electromagnetic sensor however, we can scan your entire vineyard and divide it up into different soil groups. We can drill