A day in the vineyard

Kassidee Kemp starts most of her days the same way. Phone in hand, moving block by block through the vineyard, reading what the vines are telling her. Pest pressure. Disease. Irrigation. Anything the ops team needs to know, anything that needs a second look. She's the viticulturist for the North Coast at Duckhorn Portfolio, one of California's most recognized wine groups, and her job is to know what's happening in the field before it becomes a problem.

The scouting she's always done well. It's everything that used to come after it.

The part that nobody builds software for

Here's what vineyard scouting documentation actually looks like without the right tool: observations recorded by hand, typed up later, formatted into a report, emailed out. And if you want photos in that report, which you always do, because photos are how you show the ops team exactly what you found, that's another step. Another bottleneck. Another reason the report doesn't go out until the next day, or the day after.

"Creating reports would take weeks, if not months," Kassidee says. Not because she was slow. Because that's how long it took when every report had to be rebuilt from scratch.

What changed when the season started

Kassidee and her field scout started using Tellia in March, from the first day of scouting. The process is simple. In the field, they record voice memos as they walk. Pest observations. Irrigation notes. Recommendations for the ops team. Anything that would have gone into a notebook or a voice recording app before. Tellia structures it automatically.

At the end of each week, the report is there. Ready to review, easy to edit, and for the first time, with photos attached.

"Having photos in our scouting reports is something I've never been able to have before," she says. "And photos are so important. Our vineyard ops team loves it. Being able to have a visual record along with the scouting report is awesome."

That's not a small thing in vineyard operations. When you're telling the ops team that block seven has early signs of powdery mildew, a photo isn't optional. It's the difference between them understanding what they're walking into and not.

Five minutes instead of a week

The other change that Kassidee keeps coming back to is editing. In the field, on the phone, she can pull up any record and change it on the spot. Something she forgot to add, a note she wants to update before the report goes out. No waiting until she's back at a desk.

"The ability to edit within the field on your phone has been a game changer," she says. "No other technology I've worked with has that."

The reports themselves work the same way. What used to require weeks of formatting and rebuilding can now be adjusted in five minutes. Same information. A fraction of the effort.

That matters more than it might sound. At the end of a full day in the vineyard, the last thing a viticulturist should be doing is reformatting a report from scratch. The work is in the field. The documentation should keep up, not add two hours to the end of the day.

What the rest of the season looks like

Kassidee is planning to use Tellia through the end of the season. The features she's looking forward to most are the ones that push even more of the administrative work out of her hands: automated reports generated at the end of each week, and better data visibility across the team so the right information reaches the right people without extra steps.

For a portfolio like Duckhorn, with vineyards throughout California and multiple team members scouting at once, that kind of coordination matters. It's not just about saving one person's time. It's about keeping an entire field operation running on accurate, current information.

The field work stays the same. The hours spent documenting it don't have to.

Watch the full interview HERE.