One year ago, we launched the Old Vine Registry, the world’s first and most comprehensive global database of old-vine vineyards around the world. We launched with around 2200 vineyards from 29 different countries. Today, one year later, our entries have grown more than 50% to a total of 3353 vineyards across 36 different countries.
As a crowd-sourced, non-profit public database, the addition of those 1100 new vineyards has come from the contributions of more than 200 individuals and several organizations around the world. We’ve also received a whole raft of corrections to the existing data in the database, also very welcome.
If you’re interested, you can watch the recording of our anniversary webinar here.
Good progress aside, we’re barely scratching the surface of the old vine world.
10,000 Vineyards in 3 Years
Take a look at the paltry registration coverage we have in certain regions within the Old Vine Registry:
Rioja: 7 vineyards
Chateauneuf-du-Pape: 7 vineyards
Beaujolais: 14 vineyards
Chablis: 0 vineyards
Chianti: 5 vineyards
Etna: 21 vineyards
Campania: 7 vineyards
Tokaj: 5 vineyards
Cornas: 1 vineyard
Santorini: 2 vineyards
Lebanon: 1 vineyard
Switzerland: 2 vineyards
Faugères: 3 vineyards
Loire Valley: 15 vineyards
Champagne: 8 vineyards
Canada: 19 vineyards
Bierzo: 1 vineyard
Austria: 7 vineyards
Each of the regions above has hundreds and in some cases, thousands of old-vine vineyards.
Additionally, we have zero vineyards registered from anywhere in Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Cape Verde, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Malta, Morocco, Poland, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Slovakia. All of these countries no doubt have old vines worth keeping track of.
In short, we’ve got a ton of work to do if we ever want this database to be even partially representative of the global old-vine landscape.
With that in mind, we’ve set a BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal) to register 10,000 vineyards in the next 3 years.
To encourage the old vine equivalent(s) of Stephen Pruitt (the single individual responsible for more than 1/3 of the content on Wikipedia) to step forward and help us out, we’ve launched the Heritage Vine Hunt Contest.
The Heritage Vine Hunt
The contest will run for three years, with three winners declared at the end of year one, three at the end of year two, and one grand prize winner at the end of the third year.
The grand prize is a free trip (airfare, meals, tickets) to an Old Vine Conference field trip somewhere in the world, a prize that, depending on where you live, could be worth more than $2000.
In addition to fabulous prizes, winners will get some serious bragging rights, not to mention quite a lot of social media coverage as we sing their praises.
Entering the contest is as simple as submitting new (not yet registered) vineyards to the Old Vine Registry, which can be done using the web form or (more easily) by e-mailing the data-entry spreadsheet to [email protected].
Competition Strategies
So, you want to compete, but you’re not sure how to get started? I’m more than happy to help. Feel free to send me an e-mail and I’ll set you loose on any number of little projects that will yield a bunch of old vineyards.
More broadly, here are a few key strategies for anyone who wants to spend some spare time ferreting out old-vine vineyards.
1. Sifting through Cellartracker
Cellatracker has one of the largest and most complete publicly available databases of wine in the world. If you were to go onto Cellartracker and search for “Chablis Vieilles Vignes” and then use the “summarize by” controls to summarize the results by “individual wine,” you will produce a list of 258 Chablis wines that have Vieilles Vignes in their names:
Then you just Google the websites of the producers and see if they have information on the size and planting date for that vineyard, and violà you’ve got an entry for the Old Vine…
Source : https://www.vinography.com/2024/06/research-old-vines-win-fabulous-prizes
