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First thing's first. Wildfires have, once again, ignited in California, sparked by more than 20,000 lightning strikes and intensified by record-breaking heat. As of Wednesday afternoon, the LNU Lightning Complex of fires had burned more than 46,000 acres in Sonoma, Lake, Napa and Solano counties. Tens of thousands of people are under evacuation orders around the state.

We are acutely aware of the personal devastation that these fires cause. That impact is top of mind, as we actively look for ways to help.

Full stop.

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One of the advantages of writing so regularly about wine + data is the momentum of frequent updates. About developments and news within this space, that is, as information goes out every week through Enolytics 101, and other information comes back from colleagues and friends around the world.

(That cycle of information has inspired the wine + data "support group" and community forums that you've heard about, which we continue to develop and are excited to share with you soon. Please stay tuned!)

This week it's been exciting to learn about a new development for viticulturalists and winemakers -- an app called Vine Click, from the international team at Terraview. Vine Click uses the phone camera to provide instant plant diagnoses. How? You take pictures of leaves in the vineyard, and receive instant analysis of nutrients and fungal diseases as well as volume or yield estimation.

Here's a little more Q&A:

• What's a plant "diagnosis"...? When diseases like leafroll virus, red blotch virus, Pierce's disease and mildew are immediately identified.

• How does that actually happen? The latest phones and tablets already include the technology (they're called LiDAR sensors) that measure items in 3D. That's how you get a 3D image when you take a picture of grape clusters throughout the growth cycle.

• Where does the artificial intelligence come in? Through "deep learning algorithms" that were previously trained with thousands of pictures of similar 3D clusters. In other words, the algorithms are trained to recognize something like Pierce's disease. So if you take a new picture of it, and the algorithms run on it, it will recognize that disease in your picture too.

• Then what happens? The information is correlated with other information -- from satellites, drones, weather stations and soil sensors, for example -- in order to estimate yields and production.

If you work at a winery, chances are good that you already use some or all of those tools, like those drones and soil sensors.

We're already on this "path."

Tools like Vine Click are a step further, most critically for helping track and predict climate change variables.

It's the kind of thing that seems big picture, that also shows up as something manageable because it's building onto an already-established system with tools that are already familiar.

Seems pretty cool, not for the sake of being cool but for the sake of moving this part of the industry forward another step.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Cathy