San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
From NASA to Napa: The unlikely pairing of space travel, winemaking
Napa Valley vintner Walt Brooks remembers the first moon landing vividly. He was pursuing a degree in physics, with no inkling that he would join NASA in eight years.
“I was sitting on the couch with my wife and our new baby,” he recalled, “watching on a small black and white TV. We were glued to the set. We had the sense this was a watershed event in science and technology, and that our child would grow up in a different world than we did.”
Winemaker Andy Schweiger was too young to remember the landing, yet today, 50 years after the Eagle landed, Schweiger Vineyards is reaping tangible rewards from technology NASA unleashed. It turns out astronauts and winemakers face similar challenges.
In 2002, Schweiger worked with KES Science on the first
winery test of new air purification technology that KES had developed for greenhouses on the International Space Station (ISS). Just as in the space station, the air in wine cellars can be stagnant, allowing harmful airborne mold to flourish. The purifiers Schweiger tested reduced mold spores by 99.9% within 72 hours, and are now used widely throughout the industry, sold under the AiroCide brand.
The value of the spaceborne technology, Schweiger said, is clear.
“It is a tool that lets us make cleaner, more fruit- and terroirdriven wines, more representative of the site and not the cellar,” he said.
Air purification is not the only link between Napa and NASA. Beginning in the early 1990s,
scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center near Sunnyvale teamed up with the Robert Mondavi Winery to combat a phylloxera infestation. Using multispectral digital cameras mounted on planes, they analyzed foliage density as a way of tracking and combatting the insect’s spread. They found there was a lack of foliage (fewer or smaller leaves) in phylloxera infested plants. This led to advancements in understanding the relationship between vine vigor and productivity, helping grape growers better manage their vineyards and improve profitability — mapping the health of vineyards in a matter of weeks or months instead of years or decades.
Today, Angwin-based VineView has built on this history, combining the space agency’s improvements in photography over the past two decades with improved image processing. They are able to provide wineries with detailed information on their vine canopy, even reporting on each individual vine. They use the