The vast and fascinating subject of wine captures each of us differently. You might come to wine from a love of history or chemistry or farming; you might pop into a tasting room and find that the hook has been set. You might simply belong to that band of happy Sybarites for whom flavor is king.

Or you might be a specialist in GIS (geographic information systems), with a degree in geography and a knack for mapping. Suzi Surbey, of Delta Geographic in Seattle, is one such person, and she is quietly becoming the queen of cartographic art for the wine industry.

By her own account, her interest in mapping long preceded any particular passion for wine. Beginning in the mid-1990s, her projects were mostly for air-quality-management districts or wastewater-management planners.

She first began thinking about wine maps during a barge trip through Burgundy in 1991.

Surbey and her husband, who's also a GIS specialist, had recently moved to the Seattle area from California. While barging (12 locks in one day! she remembers), they purchased a pair of vineyard maps showing the northern and southern halves of the Côte d'Or. An idea began to take shape.

"I got to thinking that I was getting tired of utility mapping, and I thought, 'I could do viticultural maps.' I got back home and began looking around, and there wasn't anything like what I wanted to do. So Washington was the first map. It took a long time to develop."

Exact locations of viticultural areas, roads, geographical features and cities had to be obtained and entered into a database in a geo-referenced fashion. Surbey didn't take shortcuts or use existing maps; she built her own. "I wanted to take the French concept and do something a little different," she explains, "and really start to show the topography, because it is so critical for wine-grape growing."

That first map, a 24-by-36-inch overview of Washington state, was released in 2002. Soon after, she created a slightly larger map that focused on Red Mountain. It shows not just individual vineyards, but plantings within vineyards, so you get a very good idea of how much syrah or sauvignon blanc is being grown, and by whom.

Five more maps followed: Walla Walla Valley, Oregon, Napa Valley, Australia and Italy. Coming soon are France and Sonoma County, with more planned.

Delta Geographic cranks these things out so quickly that it seems there must be an army of elves working furiously at their computers day and night. There is, and its name is Suzi Surbey.

The maps develop layer by layer, iteration after iteration. The cities go in, then major highways, some roads, the topography, the American Viticultural Areas and finally the wineries. For the close-up map of Red Mountain, she worked with winery and vineyard owners to painstakingly plot out each block of vines.

"I had an intuition about it," she recalls. "It had just been made an AVA, and I wanted to go to the vineyard level, and it was a good target area for that."

The results are breathtaking. Although I have been to Red Mountain on many occasions, walked the vineyards, learned the history and tasted the wines, I had never quite put all the pieces together until I sat down and studied her map. Then it all clicked.

Surbey's overview maps of Italy and Australia are equally compelling. Though she herself has never set foot in either place, she has such a meticulous eye for detail, along with infinite patience, that her maps communicate far more than just the physical layout of these places. They give a sense of history and culture, including such things as the wine varietals grown, a guide to flavor, and suggestions on food pairings.

"I wasn't really a big Italian wine drinker," she confesses, "but when I was doing the map of Italy I went out and bought a bunch of Italian wines, and just started tasting. I now have a much deeper appreciation for them. It's fun."

Labor of love doesn't begin to cover it, as I discovered on a brief tour of her studio. It's a tiny home office whose main feature, apart from a high-res computer monitor and some thick reference books on mapmaking, is a huge printer where the maps-in-process are examined and refined.

"As beautiful as the maps end up being," she confides, "there is so much tedious work that goes into it that if I really didn't love it there's no way I could do it. It's definitely a passion, or it wouldn't happen."

When pressed, Surbey admits that sales are somewhat modest, especially in view of the quality of the work and the reasonable prices. For now, the best place to view and purchase the maps is on her Web site (see page 9). They range in price from $35 to $50, and are printed on high-quality stock.

Though the marketing end of the business suffers a bit of neglect, Surbey's enthusiasm and dynamic energy show no signs of flagging. She's in the process of finishing up France, where simply entering the hundreds of tiny village names into the database would drive an ordinary mortal off the deep end.

"As soon as I get France whipped into shape," she says cheerily, "I'm going to finish up Sonoma. Then I want to have a catalog ready in the fall, so people can order that off the Web. After Sonoma, I'll move on to Spain, Portugal and Germany. I basically want to do every place that has wine. When I have all the countries, I want to do states, too, and then do sub-regions, like Tuscany."

By my reckoning, this should keep her busy until at least 2006. And what, by the way, did you do on your summer vacation?

To learn more

Web site: www.vinmaps.com

Phone: 425-415-7926

E-mail: info@deltageographic.com

Paul Gregutt is the author of "Northwest Wines" and a free-lance writer who regularly appears on the Wine pages of The Seattle Times' Wednesday Food section. He can be reached via e-mail at wine@seattletimes.com.