Grim year for grape growers

At this time of year, local vineyards should still be dotted with the last few golden, green and russet red leaves, giving a final glow of autumn colour after the annual grape harvest.

Not this year, however. Along with everyone else, the Matakana wine region has been hit hard by recent storms and flood events, resulting in the worst grape harvest anyone has ever known here, and the vines are stressed and bare.

Most grape growers could not pick any fruit at all and the few who did only managed a fraction of their usual quantity.

Hegman Foster is president of Matakana Winegrowers and owns Omaha Bay Vineyard on Takatu Road. In a good year, he would expect to pick 18 tonnes of grapes, in a bad one around 12 – this year, he barely scraped one.

“We just salvaged what little syrah, cabernet franc and malbec we could for rosé,” he said.

“I can’t recall anyone else talking about picking and, even if they did, it would only have been small amounts.”

Richard Robson runs Matakana Estate, the only sizable commercial winery left in the district. As well as making up to 13,000 bottles of his own wines, four other local vineyards process their fruit there, but this year, the winery stayed silent and unused.

“I’ve been making wine since 1996 and this was the first year that I’ve never crushed

Rodney Septic

a grape,” he said. “In the past, even if one variety has not been great, another has been okay, or I’ve been able to salvage something.” He said it was pretty soul destroying for all concerned.

“You only get one chance a year to make wine and if you lose that chance, you’ve got to wait 12 months before you can do it again.”

Foster said it put winemakers under huge budgetary pressure, missing out on a whole year of stock to sell.

“Financially, it’s not been good. A lot of small wineries don’t grow a lot of grapes or make a lot of wine and everything they bottle, they need to sell,” he said. While most producers would have red wines from previous years that they could keep selling, whites and rosés would be stretched, Foster said.

“We may have to supplement with other grapes from elsewhere to give us something to sell,” he said.

Robson agreed.

“At this point in time we’re okay, we probably have enough wine from the previous vintage, but if it happened again, we’d be stuffed,” he said.

Only time will tell what the coming season will bring, but Foster said winemakers were working together to give the stormhammered vines the best possible nutrients and care to bring them back on-stream.

Rachel Blackie, Wellsford Vet Clinic https://wellsfordvet.com/

Animal anxiety

In big hospitals, there are pain management teams for humans. In the veterinary field, vets have pain management skills which improve every year. Pain diagnosis, on the other hand, can be quite tricky. If we poke or prod somewhere and elicit a flinch, or see a limp, then the diagnosis of pain is relatively straightforward. However, some animals, just as some humans, internalise pain and discomfort. If pain becomes chronic, or chronically intermittent, we may see the behavioural signs of anxiety develop. This is especially so if there is a familial predilection for this, or a threshold number of pain events has occurred. The same can be said for stressful events within the human field. After the Christchurch earthquakes, Kiwi neuroscience educator Nathan Wallace found that within a family of children, some developed anxiety after one or two earthquake events, and other siblings developed it at four or five events. This showed that these latter children had a higher threshold before signs of anxiety developed.

So, what is anxiety?

Anxiety is defined as the anticipation of a real, or perceived, negative event. Behavioural signs of anxiety include hypervigilance, hyperactivity and fear-based behaviours in the recorded behaviours of a species. When these signs are seen out of context, and occur at a constant and elevated level or interfere with normal functioning, then it is likely to become a problem to the animal, their owners and other animals they might mix with.

In a sense, we may think we can “train away” anxiety, but essentially, we cannot. We can train legs to be more still (less hyperactive) for example, but the anxiety remains until diagnosis and treatment begins. Anxiety generally worsens if trainers think they can train it away. Often during this process, the initial (undesirable) anxiety behaviour is replaced by another undesirable behaviour, which gives a sense that we did, in fact, “train it away”. This is especially so when pain is present. We have a saying that you can’t train through the pain, and pain is indeed a common reason that training isn’t progressing as it ought to particularly within ridden horses, and even some interdog aggression cases I have seen.

Anxiety-related conditions are an extremely common class of disorders in companion animals, which includes horses, and make up a huge amount of patients presented to veterinary behaviour specialists. A subset of these animals have pain and inflammation somewhere in the body that is tricky to detect because it may be hidden inside. This is why, as a GP vet, a thorough physical exam and gathering a full history of a patient is so important. Our hands, fingers and eyes are usually the single most important diagnostic tools for pain detection that a vet has in their toolbox. Resolving any pain and its underlying cause is the first step in the treatment of anxiety-related conditions.

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