I don’t know what this tells you about the circle of  acquaintances that I run in, but I have 3 friends who have vineyards in their own yards. Some are more successful than others and I will tell you why.

 Growing grapes for use in wines takes a multitude of elements. Among them...You have to be a grower, you have to know about actually making wine, and as important as any other part, you have to be in an area that is grape friendly. Moya Shatz, Executive Director of the Idaho Wine Commission talks about one of the foremost experts in finding places where all of the geographical considerations for growing grapes are optimized. The expert’s name is Greg Jones: “Give me a little bio on Greg Jones, who is he? He is a professor from southern Oregon and he has been doing a mapping study across the world. I 1st got wind of him when I was with the Washington Wine Commission and he mapped the Puget Sound AVA. It was great because you could type in an address and it could tell you what grapes you could grow where. Does he fly in a plane over certain areas? Does he look at longitude and latitude? How does all of that work? Both. Longitude, latitude, temperature readings, he works with the geologist over here at BSU. They had a grad student go in and read all of these temperature readings on a regular basis and talked to growers to find out conditions as well. So it is pretty impressive.