Our Vineyard Practices

It is a truism that great wines is made in the vineyard.

This article will offer you an insight into the steps that can be taken to produce fruit with the right composition to make great wine. At any rate, it shows you the sort of things that we think about in the vineyard.

Location
Find the right place to grow the particular grape variety that you want to use to make wine. The right place will ripen that variety in the cool of autumn rather than in the heat of January or February. In Margaret River April provides ideal thermal conditions for ripening. There is a rule of thumb that says that if you have to add acid to the juice you have lost flavour.

Soil
Check the soil type. For great red wines it should be deep enough to sustain a mature plant over the growing season but it must be shallow enough so that the vine runs out of easily obtainable moisture in January. If the plant is to produce sufficient sugar to nourish fruit it cannot devote substrate to shoot and leaf growth after the middle of January. If the flavours are to mature properly the vine must be senescing its leaves as the crop is picked. In that case the seeds will be hard, brown and mature and the pulp will be free of green flavours. Irrigation is a last resort measure to compensate for thin soils. For white wines, depending upon the style sought, green leaves at harvest will suit wine styles with fresh green flavours and senescing leaves will make for more tannic, long lived wines that will improve in the bottle.

Avoid cultivation. It dries out the surface soil where most of the soluble plant nutrient is located.

Vineyard Equipment
Whatever passes through the vineyard should have flotation type tyres rather than lugs to avoid soil compaction. Soil compaction is a common problem in vineyards. Deep rooted plants like lupins, grown in the winter, can help to combat this.

Trellice
The leaves are a solar array producing carbohydrate. Leaves and shoots should be well spread out to take advantage of the available light. Some vineyards seem to be designed for the convenience of the farmer's favourite tractor. They are sometimes trimmed like a box hedge. In our vineyard the inter-row space is occupied by shoots and leaves and it is difficult to see how a tractor can actually pass through. But, a small tractor will easily pass brushing the foliage as it moves along.

If each shoot has space, it is not difficult to find the fruit at picking time. Because the shoot has space, the berries are partly exposed to the sun for part of the day at least rather than being buried in shade. White grapes get suitably golden, and the reds thoroughly red. The planting design and trellising arrangements are designed to that end.

Pruning
If one chooses to prune by machine there is a strong probability that the vine will produce too much leaf and shoot and the fruit will be heavily shaded. This changes the composition of the fruit at harvest. Reds tend to be green and lack colour.

If the pruning regime is hard, shoots are fewer, and bunches larger. This makes hand picking easier. An intact bunch is easy to chill in a cool room prior to processing. Intact grapes will not support rapid bacterial and yeast growth during transport which reduces or eliminates the need for additives like sulphur dioxide.

The Fruit/Leaf balance
The fruit load on a grape vine in relation to its working leaf area determines its capacity to perform in the current and succeeding years. Overwork the vine and it will go into decline. Under-work it and it will produce too much vegetation at the expense of fruit.

Disbudding
In spring the vine produces unwanted shoots on its trunk. These must be rigorously controlled in order to keep the established structure and maintain productivity.

Weeds and Pests
Avoid weedicides. They can make the local soil environment inhospitable to roots. They reduce the turnover of grasses in the vineyard. Grasses provide summer ground cover, improve soil structure, moisture infiltration, discourage runoff, assist air infiltration and build soil carbon content. If the soil is not growing plants over its entire surface it becomes less hospitable to microbes that are important in maintaining soil fertility and fungi that have a symbiotic relationship with grape vine roots. Unless there is a good population of micorrhyzal fungi the plant will be phosphate deficient.

The open environment enjoyed by each shoot is our most important insurance against fungal growth that thrives on shade and congestion. This reduces the degree to which we need to spray against powdery and downy mildews. Fortunately, when they are required, the chemicals used (elemental sulphur and copper) are low in toxicity.

The organic approach favours intervention against pests only as a last resort. We prefer pest barriers and predators rather than poisoning that wipes out some species and allows others to explode in numbers - where they can be as much of a problem as the original insect. Necessarily, this promotes a large population of spiders which can be disconcerting to European visitors.

Birds require netting - a labour intensive activity that we have refined after years of practice. The Net Whiz, designed and built by Crendon Machinery in Donnybrook is an essential tool.

Harvesting
If you choose to harvest by machine the vine and its support structure needs to be narrow. This cramps the renewal area, reduces the functionality of the leaves because they shade each other, produces reds with low colour, whites with green chlorophyll colours and tends to lower vine productivity. It's the bonsai approach. When it comes to harvest the fruit is hard to find and bunches are tiny. So, the machine approach is the only way to go.

If one creates a better solar array some vines produce too much fruit. Unless fruit is removed flavours are diluted.
We pick by hand. It's reasonably economical because the shoots are well separated, bunches are larger and easier to find. Undamaged fruit is easier to look after during transport and do not require chemical intervention. It is easier to chill whole bunches prior to crushing, a big advantage. Cold fruit enables a chemical free approach.