Monthly Report - July 2017

A bucket of black gold – activated biochar

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I have been looking through the literature to determine how you measure growth and health on a vine / vineyard and it is not easy.  Often it is very academic-ey.  The most common way is to collect of all of the canes from a single vine, weigh them and repeat all over the vineyard and then compare it to other years.  But what a difficult thing to do, and what a difficult way to define health.  If the season was wetter, you grow longer canes and thus you are really measuring rainfall over vintage – hardly useful and I reckon destroys much of what these reported growth patterns were trying to define.

So, after much deliberation I have decided on a method that should provide me with a window on a vines health – measuring the rate of growth in early spring and this is able to be defined by the individual widths between the 4th to 8th nodes on a fruiting cane.  Measuring this, which represents a time when there is plenty of groundwater and warming spring weather, provides you with the fixed data from a specific period that is pretty much identical weather wise and it shows me how the vine has accessed nutrients in this important period – too bigger gaps and the vine is bursting with energy, too small and the vine is struggling.  I have gone and measured the vines from 4 specific rows that we will be treating with biochar and/or guano gold fertilizer and it will be interesting to see how it will pan out over the long run.  My Excel spreadsheet shall runneth over.

Changing vine patterns…

All those years ago in 2001 when we planted out our vineyard, we were on the tail end of a large vineyard expansion in the region.  Huge estates were planted in the southern portion of Margaret River, especially in the areas around Alexander Bridge and Witchcliffe.  Almost 90% was planted out to Cab Sauv, Chardonnay and Sauv Blanc / Semillon, and it was seen as the great leap forward as wine sales were booming for the incumbents and they were desperate for more volume to match this demand.  And then it all came crashing down, culminating in the Global Financial Crisis that basically stopped the whole industry for a while.

With this scenario also playing out across many of the more highly regarded wine growing regions of Australia, it can be noted that since 2001 there has been very very few new vineyards developed.  But, look about your bottle shop, your wine sites, even possibly your wine cellar; there are literally 100’s of new labels arriving every year (possibly month) and this is not likely to stop soon.  The slicing and dicing of the grape crop each year is now becoming an amazing splintering into a million tiny pieces – there has been no addition to the vine count, but the grapes and wines are now spread far and wide.

In effect in the past 10 years we have had an explosion of wineries and not vineyards.  And those wineries are often a few barrels within other larger wineries, and then even further split down again – like an inverted pyramid.  There is a fascination with these new labels to have something quirky about their wines or their region / grape varieties etc so as to fit into the buzz that gets generated with being “new”.  There was a fascination for a while with the various ancient vineyards of the Barossa in regards to many of the Shiraz wines that became of huge interest in the United States – the older the vines the bigger the price for the wine, but this has mostly passed.

Nowadays, the fascination lies in the organic/ biodynamic grapes, natural winemaking, odd and unusual varieties, cool and arty packaging, links to interesting people, odd European heritage of the winemaker, the good looks of the winemaker – if you can think of a marketing angle here then it is most probably being tried.  With the vineyards on the ground staying roughly the same the splitting out of some of the vineyards with mixes of odd and interesting varieties is simply astounding.  

Talking with uber cool Brad Wehr of Amato Vino, one of the vineyards he sources grapes from is called Ricca Terra Farms in Riverland which itself sells to a myriad of winemakers who wish to make wines from unusual varieties.  And in turn Ricca Terra Farms buys grapes in to meet the demand of the ever-increasing group of winemakers who are finding this route to market a pathway forward.  Brad also makes and buys wine in Margaret River, and one of his suppliers are our good friends Lynne and Phil Foster, who in turn sell grapes to over 6 different wineries and winemakers (including us from time to time when I get a crazy urge to experiment).

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