Appellation Visualization

I've been reading some wine books here and there, and without naming any titles, I have to say that one of the unfortunate common problems is that the maps are really, really bad. It's a pretty frustrating situation.

I've played around a bit with Google Earth, and I think it could be a tool to create better appellation maps. There are plenty of benefits - you can show various climate data, like rainfall or temperatures, and you can put them in layers that you can turn on and off, depending on how you want to see the map at that moment. You can travel around a place to get a real feel for the topography. You could even map various types of soil, or which vines are most commonly grown in an area, or just communities for collaboration - because let's face it, no one is going to be able to map the whole world of wine by themselves.

I bet the folks over at Appellation Americawould be interested in this, among plenty others.

Whoa, in the midst of writing this post, I see that someone has already thought of this idea (I should have known!)


How wonderful!