A VITICULTURIST 'S DIARY
Unusual growing season with challenging outcome
"It has been very intense". So said a wine making colleague here in the Pfalz, Germany in the week after the harvest ended. A delicate yet broad understatement I thought. Just a week prior to the start of the harvest I heard from a friend whose regular cellarhand had taken a fall, resulting in a broken wrist. So I made apologies to my expected employer, (who was in a position where I could leave him at short notice,) and agreed to travel over to another village for the duration. This has been an unusual growing season, the outcome being a series of unusual challenges. I hear mixed reviews coming out of the UK so this was perhaps a northern European set of circumstances. Several events occurred here that gave rise to our problems. Whilst the jury is still out regarding the impact from varying management strategies, nature
came in with circumstances that on occasions gave rise to insurmountable difficulties. In places these troubles were widespread. In the middle of summer, just after flowering had run its course, there were several weeks of wet and warm weather patterns sweeping through the region. Naturally this gave rise to some difficulties for vineyard managers, but it also was an excellent period for initial berry growth. This set one of the stages for future problems – massive yields. This is a region of mixed field vegetable growing, and across a range of crops including those summer harvest salad type crops. Whilst you might not think that these crops give rise to potential 'cross over' issues to vines, they very probably harbour early generations of fruit fly populations. I've seen this previously whilst working in a winery adjacent to outside, field grown tomatoes, but I wasn't expecting
problems here. Heavy fruit set in grapes also gives rise to the increased incidence of one bunch lying directly on another. Sometimes with a leaf or two between them. Disasterous where rots are inevitable. The soil had retained enough moisture so come veraison the berries swelled up and perhaps way beyond that which is normal. Whilst a double size of crop might sound beneficial to those that only seek high yields, the problems quickly started to multiply. In some varieties more than others, but in general all around. The weather was incredibly warm – day and night. In simple terms this was heading towards large crops, but very low sugar levels – ripening across all varieties came upon us very fast. Surprisingly given the size of most crops the acid level was low (possibly a result
Sam Doncaster works for Volker and Marion Freytag, of Rebschule Freytag, Lachen-Speyerdorf, Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, Pfalz ENVELOPE samdoncaster@hotmail.com
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