The data
Where the facts come from.
A guest should never read an invented number. Every fact in an answer, a card or a story comes from one of these sources, and each card's "How we know" fold shows the value, source, method and date.
| Source | What it is | What we take from it |
|---|---|---|
| Your own notes | The winery's facts, tech sheets, stories and tasting profiles, entered by chat or photographed. | Labelled "from the winery" in every answer. Always outranks a computed value. |
| Weather since 1940 | Open-Meteo's historical archive of the ERA5 and ERA5-Land reanalyses (ECMWF, Copernicus), hourly, at the vineyard's own coordinates; the forecast tops up the current season. | Growing degree days, heat and cool-night indices, rain before picking, frost dates, winter lows, disease-pressure models. Each value ranked against that site's record. |
| Station records | NOAA GHCN-Daily, the nearest long-running weather station, often more than a century of readings. | Cross-checks the reanalysis and gives the hundred-year cold and heat records. |
| Soil | USDA NRCS Soil Survey (SSURGO) through Soil Data Access; SoilGrids (ISRIC) outside the United States. | Soil series, texture, drainage, water-holding capacity, depth, pH and parent material under the vines and under each block. |
| Terrain | USGS 3DEP elevation. | Elevation, slope, aspect and a cold-air-pooling flag. |
| Imagery | USGS National Map imagery and topographic tiles; NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) for the vineyard through the season. | The vineyard from above, soil map-unit outlines over it, and greenness at budbreak, veraison and harvest. All attributed on the card. |
| Appellations | American Viticultural Area boundaries from the UC Davis AVA project. | The AVA outline on the map and the appellation name on the page. |
| Grapes | Wikipedia summaries, linked and credited. | The "about the grape" card: origin and parentage, marked as general knowledge. |
How an answer is built
- The winery's page is built from its website, then filled in by chat: facts, profiles, pick dates, observations from the season.
- When a winery joins, Cuvaio computes its growing season for every year since 1940 and ranks each vintage against the site's own record. The soil, terrain and imagery come along.
- A guest's question goes to the model with exactly one packet: this wine's facts and profile, the season's computed values, and the winery's approved stories. Nothing else.
- Every number in the draft answer is checked against that packet. A sentence with a number that isn't there is never shown, and a question the facts can't answer is passed to the winery rather than guessed.
- Anything general (how a grape usually behaves, a pairing principle) is said as general knowledge, never as a fact about this bottle. No health claims, no drinking advice.
- Pictures are drawn by the server from the same packet. The model may only ask for a card by name.
Disease-pressure values describe weather conditions only and are never spray advice. Computed values are estimates from public datasets and are labelled as such; a winery can override any of them with its own records, and the override is labelled too.