Overview

Project Description

The American Viticultural Areas (AVA) Digitizing Project produces spatial data from each of official American Viticultural Areas boundary descriptions which are accepted and published by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). The methods we use to create the data are documented here so that the data is reproducable and usable for scientific and social science research. This data is produced by the UC Davis Library and UC Davis DataLab, in partnership with UCSB, Virginia Tech, other organizations, and contributions from the general public.

Project Rationale

All wine sold is marked by a geographic location where the wine’s grapes were grown. Sometimes these geographical markers, or appellations, are shaped by political boundaries, but more often a wine’s geography is marked by a designated grape-growing region. In the United States, grape-growing regions are called American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) and their boundaries are established by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) under the Department of the Treasury. As of March 2022 there are 259 different AVAs, each recognized for its distinctive topographical, climatic, and/or historic and cultural features. Some are as well-known as the Napa Valley AVA established in 1981, but new AVAs are typically added each year, as they are approved by the TTB.

These designations are extremely important to the development of both the wine industry and wine research. They provide the standard geographical category for those seeking to evaluate and compare wine aesthetics, wine production and marketing data, and the science related to different wine-growing environments.

While the AVAs are widely used in industry and research, there is no other freely available and open-access spatial dataset demarcating both the current and historical boundaries of these regions with well-documented methods that seeks to reproduce the offical boundary descriptions as written. Before this project, spatial representations of the official AVA boundaries delineated in the US Code of Federal Regulations were incomplete, and those that were available were restricted and expensive to use. Since the start of our project, the TTB has released their own AVA dataset, but without documented methods or revised and retired boundaries. We extend to researchers and industry a dataset that is well-suited to reproducible academic research.

The AVA Project seeks to empower the study of wine regions and facilitate research into emerging environmental questions, while enabling greater insight into this important sector of the California’s economy and culture.