Oenoview® wins award at the Paris International Agriculture Show

The Oenoview® service for wine growers wins bronze medal in the “Agriculture and New Technologies” category

Paris. – Oenoview® has won the bronze medal in the “Agriculture and New Technologies” category, awarded today at the 2009 Paris International Agriculture Show.
Infoterra, a subsidiary of EADS Astrium, and the Institut Coopératif du Vin (ICV) have developed Oenoview to offer the benefits of space technology to professionals in the wine growing industry.

Infoterra, a subsidiary of EADS Astrium, and the Institut Coopératif du Vin (ICV) have developed Oenoview to offer the benefits of space technology to professionals in the wine growing industry.



Oenoview is an extremely specialist service, based on the analysis of satellite imagery, which carefully monitors vine growth and identifies differences in grape quality from one plot of land to the next – or even on the same plot. Oenoview is therefore tailor-made for wine growers looking to offer customers the best quality wine.


Using innovative technology, Infoterra uses high-resolution satellite imagery to generate geographical data on vineyards – the number of leaves per square metre, the density of vegetation cover, etc. The information is displayed on maps, and is then analysed and discussed by wine growing specialists at the ICV. The primary aim is to help wine growers manage their work effectively – in terms of pruning, fertilising, stripping, etc. – and to reduce their production costs.



Oenoview allows the wine grower to see the differences in grape quality and ripeness from one plot of land to the next (or even within the same plot of land) – so they can harvest the grapes separately when different varieties are ripe,. This results in high quality wines.



For Jean-Michel Darroy, CEO of Infoterra France, this prize acknowledges the “research carried out by the whole team and the first-rate partnership between Infoterra and ICV. There are also promising signs on the sales front: after two years of tests, mainly in the Languedoc-Roussillon region, Oenoview is now starting to take off in many other French wine growing regions, in particular Bordeaux, and is catching the eye of other wine producing countries.”



Oenoview® was developed as part of the VINNOTEC collaborative research programme at the Q@LI-MEDiterranée competitiveness cluster (an association of companies, research centres and educational institutions working in partnership on innovative projects). The project received financial support from Oséo (the French agency promoting growth and innovation at small and medium sized companies), the Languedoc-Roussillon region, and the European Regional Development Fund.



Infoterra

Infoterra, wholly owned by Europe’s leading space company Astrium, is a leading provider of geo-information products and services for managing the development, environment and security of our changing world. With entities in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain and Hungary, its customers include international corporations, governments and authorities around the globe, and organisations such as the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA).

Infoterra operates across a comprehensive range of markets - communications, environment, security, agriculture, defence, oil & gas exploration and many more. Furthermore, Infoterra holds the exclusive commercial exploitation rights for the high-resolution radar satellite TerraSAR-X, and plays a leading role in geo-information services within the European GMES initiative of the EC and ESA.
Infoterra, together with Spot Image, forms the the Earth Observation division of Astrium Services.