03/17/06 Wine Industry Website

New website helps winegrape growers and vintners. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Running a winery is a whole lot more than growing and fermenting a few grapes. That's pretty obvious. But running a successful business that compares to others in the industry can he quite a challenge. Now a new website offers winegrape growers and vintners the ability to manage their resources and help the identify areas that need attention. Vinewise, the Washington Guide to Sustainable Viticulture, is an online, interactive guide of business and viticulture topics created by and for Washington state wine grape growers and vintners to determine and assess their current viticulture management practices against industry standards of sustainability. The Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers developed the online site and Executive Director, Vicky Scharlau explains. SCHARLAU: The idea is that Vinewise is first a checklist to make sure you are asking all the right questions. Then the next step is what we just released is about evaluating or doing a self assessment to say okay I've done all these things but how well am I doing these things. Vinewise is made up of a number of different topics covering all areas of operation. SCHARLAU: There's 13 different topics. Everything from marketing to contracts, a real mix of topic areas that are germane to those that grow wine grapes. The idea right now is to drive growers to the website to have them go through the self assessment. And then over time, within the next year or so we'll accumulate those self assessments so that we can try to get a bearing or benchmark if you will of where the industry is right now on sustainability. You can check out Vinewise on the web at www.vinewise.org. I'm Greg Martin and that's today's Fruit Grower Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.