The Virginia Sustainable Winegrowers Self-Assessment Guide (VSWAG) has been updated to provide a correction and three usability features for all users and finally several tool administrator functions that the user will not see or use but are important to keep the VSWAG up and running as well as giving me the ability to gather some statistics, for example as of this writing, we have 41 contributors registered in the tool and they have registered 38 different vineyard blocks.

The modifications that are of interest to you as users are listed below with a short explanation of its use.

  • Nelson County is now in the pull down menu for registering vineyard blocks, and we have an Out of State choice that is at the end of the list when you create a new block. On existing registered blocks, Out of State will be in the alphabetic order of the menu.  All you folks in Nelson County who have used other counties in the Central Region in the interim, should go into the tool and correct the entry.
  • When you log in you will now see a separate Welcome page with a short introduction and a Read More icon that takes you to the Support Center where all the help items are stored.
  • The Pesticide Safety and Management topic now has a short statement “This topic has no practices – please proceed to the next topic” which should solve the confusion about why there is no score for this heading that has no practices directly under it.
  • The tool now has the capability to let you print your Guide topic by topic  showing the scores you have entered. Clicking the Print Icon brings up a PDF file screen asking you to chose Open or Save. Choosing Open brings up the printable version without cluttering your file system, unless of course you do want to save the printable file.

This release basically completes the development work that AGSquared was contracted to perform. Their remaining task is to operate the tool on their servers and, of course, correct any functional problems we may discover over the next year. We can, of course, come up with modifications that we may desire or need as we get more users into the system. Development of such new functionality may well require a new agreement with the developer, but that should not keep us from growing the usefulness of the tool.

Meanwhile, I encourage all of you who are not already users, to register and begin using the tool. I would like to see us double our participation from the current 41 users by the end of this growing season. That would give us, as an association, some meaningful statistics while preserving anonymity of the users even in small counties. Then we might begin to see where we can apply some new or additional educational topics to help us all in our quest to increase the impact of Virginia wines on the world stage.