Blogs - Spring has arrived

Location: Blogs Setting up a small vineyard in NZ
Posted by: martinp	10/09/2008
Spring has at last arrived here in NZ, the flowers are blooming, the trees are budding, and the vines are shooting. The weather has been very wet over the winter, reports say 4-5 times the normal rainfall. This has meant that work all but stopped on the vines and it is only yesterday I was able to start the new season spraying program. The vines have to be sprayed against mould and fungus which has a really detrimental effect on plant growth. Most, if not all, fruit types suffer from this but it has been a bit of a disappointment for me to find out what really has to happen as far as spraying is concerned. Maybe this is something to think about when buying fruit and vegetables at the supermarket, I guess that an "out of sight, out of mind" approach is typical over this. So the vines got a dose of sulphur and copper and separately Roundup to control the weeds. The mould spray has to happen every week while the vines are shooting as new leaves will have no protection from the last spray. Every vine has buds or small leaves I am pleased to say, though some are further advanced than others. This year is another strengthening year for the plants, any flowers/grapes will be cut off to allow all the young plants energy to go into developing a strong structure rather than fruit at this time. There is more Roundup to apply to get everything tidy and it's interesting that a small vineyard like ours really does take some effort, especially as regard the spraying, which is quite tiresome when only using a backpack spray. Once the vines are fully fruiting, I can see that the maintenance effort required will be quite a lot, so a small tractor mounted sprayer will be on my Xmas list. The downside of learning how to grow and manage grape production has unfortunately made me a little less keen on drinking it. Wine has a romantic, and maybe sophisticated air about it, but when you know just how much in the way of chemicals are fired at the vines, it's a bit of a turn off. I know there are organic wine growers, and my hat goes of to them, the amount of effort in keeping a vineyard trouble free just using organic methods must be enormous. Martin

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Comments (2)

Re: Spring has arrived

By Timeless on 11/09/2008

Hi Martin, Good to hear about the progress on the vineyard again -although it is quite depressing to hear you talk of signs of spring when we have completely missed out on summer in the UK this year. Only the winter for us to look forward to.

It was really news to me that so many chemicals are used in vine production. I was going to ask how they manage to produce organic wine. Does this mean that they use no pesticides? Sound as if you have a long way to go to the first harvest. Keep us posted

Re: Spring has arrived

By martinp on 11/09/2008

There are several organic additives supposedly offering the same control as their chemical counterparts however, by their nature being much less aggressive in action, the underlying management of the crop needs to be more intensive to allow the organic additive a chance to work effectively. But it can be, and is, done which means organic wines are available in small quantities almost everywhere.

We were badly advised before starting on this that we could expect our first crop this year. Subsequent discussions with the commercial wine growers in our area has revealed that this shouldn't be the case, and that the vines be allowed at least one more summer to establish properly or there is a real chance that they will never produce good quality, or volumes of, grapes.

We have a larger vineyard next door to us, probably 5 x the size, so I can simply walk over to see what he is doing. But he had big problems last year, it will be interesting to see what happens this year.