A VITICULTURIST 'S DIARY
A view from further away In the third of his series of a ‘A Day in the life of a Viticulturist' series, Sam Doncaster at Rebschule Freytag, in the Pfalz region discusses vineyard establishment. Looking back towards the UK, puts a spotlight on a generally young industry that has held a strong bias towards effective, efficient vineyard establishment services. No doubt there comes a time when people can give more consideration to some rather universal issues like periodic labour shortages, aspects of soil management and perhaps 'what's next… what to plant further?’ The mature vineyard industry of Europe has faced these issues, and for many of years. The results being, in simple terms, to mechanise, to reduce chemical inputs, to give more thought to the results from vine breeding. Germans are great engineers and are ever creative in making new machines and devices, to assist in minimising the effort of vineyard management.
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There has also been less of an adherence to the traditional, as compared to some other places. A strong feeling around environmental issues has ensured an increasingly large proportion of vineyards are either fully certified as organic (or similar) or at the very least people use organic thinking and methods as common practice. Whilst there are concerns, valid too, for an excess of soil 'tillage', (however you might interpret that,) many people will at sometime 'turn the soil over'. This is most often seen directly under the vines, where it can be an effective alternative to the use of herbicide. There are periodic 'inter-row' forms of cultivation that can be managed to offer differing contributions to soil management.
For example, minimising the competition for available soil solution, ie removing the weeds prior to flowering, by discing or ploughing the soil. This carries the benefit of giving an increase in fruit set; weeds being shockers for competing for valuable soil solution at this time. These above activities do not have to be brutal in their actions, where a simple plough can 'lift and roll' just the surface few inches. This effectively 'folds in' a green manure that can be broken down by the ever present soil eco-systems, leaving no direct path to the surface for the moisture to escape through capillary lift. A couple of months later and after a disc harrow passage, a further cover crop can be planted whilst the soil is well warm, and
