Vineyard blocks, the spray diary and EU-compliant records

Blocks are the unit of record for everything in the vineyard module — sprays, scouting, soil, yield and the weather-driven forecasts. Set them up once and every record hangs off them.

Create a block

1. Go to /vineyard/blocks — the Block Register — and press + Add Block.
2. Enter the Block Name (required), plus variety, clone, rootstock, area in hectares, trellis system and certification status.
3. If your country gives your land an official parcel reference, enter it in the parcel field (the form names it the way your country does: SIGPAC reference in Spain, numéro d'îlot (PAC) in France, LPIS parcel number in Ireland, and so on). The spray register export needs it in the EU.
4. Give the block a location by entering its Latitude and Longitude in the Where is this block? fields — long-press the spot in Google Maps and copy the two numbers, or use the centre of the block. (The separate GeoJSON boundary textarea is optional — only for a polygon outline you already have from a mapping tool; its centre is used as a fallback if you leave latitude and longitude blank.) The block's coordinates drive the nightly per-block weather feed, which in turn powers phenology and disease forecasts, so don't skip this.
5. Press Create Block.

The free Cellar Hand plan includes 2 blocks; Winemaker (€19/yr) allows 3, and the Vineyard plan (€33/mo) and above are unlimited.

Log a spray

Sprays are logged as activities on a block:

1. Open the block, switch to the activities tab and press + Log Activity.
2. Set the Activity Type to SPRAY, with the date, operator and equipment.
3. Under Register details, enter the start time of the application (the time you started spraying, not the time you are typing it in), the BBCH growth stage and the area actually treated (ha). MakeWine suggests a BBCH stage from the block's phenology and the block's area as the treated area; nothing is saved until you accept or type a value, because a partial spray of a block must not be recorded as the whole block.
4. Under Chemical Applications, press + Add Chemical for each product: chemical name, active ingredient, registration number, category, FRAC code, rate per hectare, total quantity, PHI (days) and REI (hours), and the target pest or disease.
5. Save. You can save a spray without the register details and add them later from the block's activities tab. From the PHI, MakeWine calculates the withdrawal date automatically — the earliest safe harvest date is shown against the application. If you have applied the same FRAC group too often, the entry is flagged with a FRAC rotation risk warning for resistance management. That warning is a Vineyard-plan feature (Vineyard, Estate and Winery) — on Cellar Hand, Winemaker and Compliance you still log the spray and get the PHI withdrawal date, but not the rotation flag.

The spray diary and CSV export

/vineyard/blocks records roll up into the Spray Diary at /vineyard/spray-diary — one register across all blocks, filterable by block, category and date range. A second tab, FRAC Group Usage, summarises applications per FRAC group and flags groups worth rotating.

Press Export PPP register (CSV) to download an inspection-ready file. The export covers the fields Regulation (EU) 2023/564 sets out — product, authorisation number, date and start time, dose per hectare, official parcel ID, area treated (ha), crop (EPPO code VITVI) and BBCH growth stage — plus the agronomic extras (FRAC, PHI, REI, withdrawal date, operator, weather) that buyers and inspectors ask for.

If any entry in the export is missing a field your country requires, the export is refused and lists each entry with what is missing and a link to fix it. Saving a spray never requires these fields; only the register you hand over does. Which fields are required follows the country of the block's site (set under Settings → Sites): the EU list for EU member states and Northern Ireland.

When the electronic format becomes mandatory. The application record itself has been required since 1 Jan 2026 (Regulation (EU) 2023/564). Regulation (EU) 2025/2203 lets member states defer the electronic format to 1 Jan 2027: France, Germany and Spain point to 1 Jan 2027, and Italy to 31 Dec 2026. Check your country's plant-protection authority for the date that applies to you.

Scouting

On the block's scouting tab, press + Record Visit to record a walk. The record is the visit, not the finding — a clean walk that found nothing is saved with an outcome of Clean, and no pest or disease at all. That matters more than it sounds: a clean walk is exactly what IPM practice and certification audits want to see, and it is the record most systems make impossible to keep.

When there is something to report, you choose the pest or disease from a fixed vocabulary and record severity as a percentage of tissue affected — the standard SAD steps (1, 3, 6, 12, 25, 50, 75) rather than a vague band — plus the percentage of rows affected, whether the economic threshold was exceeded, the action taken, and photos. Visits appear on the block timeline and feed your decision record when a spray follows an observation.

One term in that vocabulary is deliberately broad: grapevine yellows covers Flavescence dorée and Bois noir together, because they cannot be told apart by eye and FD is a notifiable disease in much of the EU. Recording a suspicion as the specific one is a legal hazard; recording what you actually saw is not.