TM: Are there actual mapmakers at Folly at if so, what does a workday look like for that crew? MP: Depending on the country and location, it’s about one to three years. TM: Given the constant updates, do wine country maps have an average lifespan in terms of relevancy? So, we’ve created an iterative map system so that I can fix mistakes and also add new regions when they become adopted. Thus, I’m very protective of the information. It can take me weeks to create and edit a map. Of course, it gets a lot harder with wine regions. We are lucky the United States supports this endeavor. For example, if you want to plot all the roads of Spain, what Spanish government body has the information and how do you communicate with them to get it? I wish more countries were as organized as the USGS (United States Geological Survey). MP: Being accurate and getting good information is the biggest challenge. TM: What’s the biggest challenge of documenting such an ever-changing industry? I wish all the American AVAs were this easy to work with! For example, the Van Duzer Corridor AVA in Oregon has clear defining features (namely wind) and a shapefile (the name for GIS area coordinates) to define it. That being said, I’ve been very impressed with how new AVAs are doing a much better job using factual information (soils, aspect, elevation, climate, location) to define new wine areas. I do not think wine maps have increased because of American AVAs. Maps were a way to get a lay of the land and give context to things. For me personally, I was a computer gamer and avid fantasy/sci-fi reader. MP: I suspect the interest in wine maps is because of people’s reliance on and comfort with tools like Google Maps, navigation systems, iOS, etc.
TM: Has wine country mapmaking and cartography grown with the rise of American AVAs and sub-appellations? The current plan is to role all of this geographic information into my partner business, Global Wine Database. The project started in 2013 when I made wine maps for the Wine Folly blog. I started with the most popular wine regions and slowly built up a collection of hundreds of shapefiles and data over time. Madeline Puckette: Currently, we have an ongoing project creating and updating wine maps of the world. The Manual: What types of mapmaking projects is Wine Folly currently involved in? We chatted by email with sommelier, cofounder of Wine Folly, and mapmaker Madeline Puckette about the intersection of cartography and wine: It takes months to create the maps and, because the regions change so often with new appellations and boundaries sprouting up, they become irrelevant fast, too. Today, it’s a big part of what the brand does. What started as visuals for the site’s blog in 2013 has turned into a full-grown business. Wine Folly has been at the center of the mapmaking side of the wine boom.
And because we’re still figuring out just why all of these little geographic pockets are so unique, the maps are constantly changing. Famous regions like Napa and the Willamette Valley are showing off their unique geography by way of eye-catching cartography, something longstanding locales like Burgundy and Rioja have been doing for centuries.
With so much evolution, there’s been a lot of mapping and re-mapping. Here in the New World, the scene is young enough that we’re still drawing our maps, outlining certain viticultural zones, and relishing their unique climates and resulting flavors.
American wine is booming, public health crisis be damned.