A methodology for evaluating the temporal stability of spatial patterns of vineyard variation

Vineyards vary substantially in the quantity and quality of grapes they produce. The study was undertaken in a commercial “Semidano” vineyard block (0.6 ha) in the municipality of Mogoro (Sardinia isle, Italy) during the vintages of 2008, 2009 and 2010. A total of 106 plants were sampled and georeferenced. To assess the joint spatial and temporal variation of the vine properties, a multivariate geostatistics technique was applied, called factor cokriging, which aims at decomposing the overall variance in a restricted number of regionalised scale-dependent factors. The thematic maps of the vineyard properties and the ones of the factors show a large variability on both space and time. All the measurements of spatial agreement reveal a lack of temporal stability of the variation patterns over the years.