Vineyards are a dominant feature of the coastal region; in fact, they are a fundamental element of the region's spatial culture. Focusing on the vineyards provides us with much of the core "grammar" of the space we are examining:
- Many of the vineyards throughout the coastal region are clustered (the few that aren't are perhaps the most interesting).
- The hachures are not detailed enough to allow us to make any robust observations about the relationship between vineyard locations and elevation other than to say that they do not follow ridge lines (not terribly surprising!).
- Many of the vineyards are transected by roads (bear in mind that these were mainly dirt and wide enough only for a single carriage), ravines, and rivers.
- All are confined within the thin tracery of lines meant to suggest a variegated terrain of ownership, value, varietal, etc.
- The seemingly haphazard shapes and sizes of the vineyards suggest that geography played a more important role in the demarcation of vineyard properties than survey lines or other forms of land administration.
- This map obscures any sense of change over time. Here we learn nothing about the genealogy of the lines demarcating one vineyard parcel from another, and we are left to wonder about the history of ownership and productivity. Happily, troves of archival documents allow us to overcome the interpretive constraints of this temporal flatness.