Vallformosa continues to innovate and invest in new technologies to improve and optimise the wine process, in line with our commitment to the territory, its sustainability and, above all, the quality of DO Penedès production. This is why we have participated in the Optivinya project, a pilot plan to optimise the control of ripening and quantity of the grape harvest financed with European funds through Operation 16.01.01 of the Cooperation for Innovation Programme for Rural Development of Catalonia 2014-2020 of the Generalitat de Catalunya.

The main objective of the Optivinya project is to provide the cava sector and, by extension, the wine sector (especially the dry wine sector) with tools to control the quantity of the harvest, as well as to control the ripening of the different plots and to be able to determine the date of the verema in a more accurate way from data obtained with remote sensing systems.

In this sense, Vallformosa has led the GO-DARP OPTIVINYA project, a tool for determining the water status of the wine through meteorological and soil data.

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The aim of the project is to make use of technology to evaluate the state of the plots as a whole, focusing on the management of the farm as a group of plots. The management and study unit will be the current agricultural plots. In this way, this tool will be of great use to associations that bring together a large number of producers, such as cooperatives, ADVs, DOs, etc.

The specific objectives of the project are as follows:

1. To develop the correlation and validation of the aerial data with the field variables for each of the varieties under study (Xarel-lo and Macabeu).
2. Drawing up growth charts throughout the grape ripening period in order to be able to determine in advance the harvest forecasts.
3. Determine classification models to predict quality parameters for the different study plots.
4. To evaluate the oenological quality of the vinifications produced from the harvest of the different groups studied.
5. To evaluate the economic viability of the actions carried out.

You can find more information here.