When I was Foppiano’s publicist, I used to love going into the office to visit with everyone and read what Lou (senior) used to write on their large map each day as the weather. Talk about a great old-fashioned way to record the seasons, so that he could easily look back from vintage to vintage and understand the wine’s character. Old Lou also has a lot of character, and is quite the character. My job with him was fun…

Meanwhile, I was just Emailed by Bill Kirk. He has a very useful gardening, vineyard, and travel planning web site at www.weathertrends360. It provides year-ahead daily weather forecasts for every inch of the planet, hour-by-hour. If you’re a grower or even a wine enthusiast keeping track (or planning a vacation), this is a great location, and it’s free. (We love free!)

If you’re planting new vineyards, Guys, you know that this is all very important information to have in advance:

• Temps
• Precip
• Winds
• Humidity
• Maps as seen via a satellite
• US Radar

For surfers:

• Wave heights (surfers, unite)
• Ocean temps
• UV

What makes this site so powerful is the year-ahead content. (Bill tells me that no one has that.) It’s also global. (They do every point on Earth, and no one has that, either.) It’s a perfect weather condition event/travel planning tool to quickly find the perfect weather – anywhere in the world (and you can guess that they also have an exclusive on this).

From Bill Kirk:

We have been doing this for 9 years with huge clients like Wal-Mart, Target, Kohl’s, Abercrombie Fitch, Burlington Coat Factory, Golf Channel Solutions, Agway, Simbhaoli Sugars India, AutoZone, Energizer, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Fonterra Dairy, Clorox, Johnson & Johnson, Anheuser-Busch, 3M, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citi (over 125 others in 23 countries) to help them better plan using our year-ahead forecasts to determine how much seasonal product to buy, where to put it, when to promote it, advertise and run markdowns. We are now offering a free consumer friendly version of this technology at www.wt360.com.

We’ve won six major business technology awards in the past two years including #5 on Forbes list of America’s Most Promising Companies out of 10,000+ companies. Our short and long range forecasts are independently audited by Forecast Watch and determined to be the most accurate in the industry. We have been featured on ABC 20/20, Good Morning America, CNBC, Fox News, etc.

We already have over 10,000 registered users in 155 countries with hundreds of wine enthusiasts. Our unique content is cropping up on consumer sites like pollen.com (allergy sufferers), tangotraffic.com, AAA.com, CharterBusConnect.com, World Travel Channel (Turkey) and soon Better Homes and Gardens.

I believe that this is a really cool addition for my Amenities, Supplies, Services link on Wine-blog. Also, when I signed in, I was instantly given the weather in my home town for the last month; highs and lows. (Can you say “Bookmark This Page!”) You’ve got to check out the maps. No more waiting for the evening news to see a global perspective of what’s happening… And, BTW, as I looked at the globe, I was astounded to see how much moisture is circling us as we’re circling it in the atmosphere. Usually weather reports are somewhat locally isolated. Let’s say you’re traveling from San Francisco to Portugal. You can watch the forecast right before your eyes.