3 weeks is a long time in viticulture

It’s been a while. But - I’ve been too busy doing the project to have any time to write the thing up. Isn’t that the big problem with blogging and face-booking? They become an alternative to life.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m doing my Face Book and ‘blog’
‘What are you doing now?’
‘I’m still doing my FB and b’

My last brief blog and entry in FB was the baffling reference to ‘dark tubes’. We started the tube stripping on the 12th of Feb (a couple of days before the Charlie James Gang’s visit.) and I was becoming worried about the high % of dead and struggling vines inside the tubes. I did a complete survey and the results, expressed graphically here show the % dead in each row. The struggling vines are also about the same %wise (sorry about that % thingie).

In brief: out of 3055 vines we have 455 dead (15%) and 343 struggling (11%). The majority of deaths/strugglers are in the middle 2 blocks of the yard and nearly all in dark tubes.

We had been told to expect a maximum of 5% deaths so faced with a potential of 26% we were pretty well convinced that something was up. My belief was that the dark printed tubes intensified the heat in those hot days we had in December and January and in effect cooked and killed the young delicate shoots.

We managed to contact Johan Wiese of V & G Nurseries (the vine suppliers) and he arrived as soon as he could on Monday 23 Feb. He more or less confirmed our prognosis. It is worth adding here his further observations.

We had a combination of 4 things that had gone wrong. I now start to understand the word terroir – not a small french evil dog – but the local conditions.

1. We planted late. November instead of August/September. Not our fault but the fact that our contractor decided it was too dry/too wet/too whatever – so didn’t turn up at the right time. We decided then to plant in November when Jake and Sam’s crew were available and we were back in the country.
2. We then decided to fit grow tubes in December to see if we could gain a year and get the vines to the cordon wire quickly. We should have fitted the tubes in October when it was cooler and the ‘forced’ vine shoots would have been strong and sap system established by the time the heat came in December and January. It would have been better to not have fitted tubes at all and just have let the vines go bush for the first year (as we did with the surplus vines- all doing well -by coincidence). We are now stripping tubes from the vines that haven’t quite made the wire yet to give them a chance to get some bushy leaves over what remains of the summer.
3. We had good rains in early November and the good ground in the middle 2 blocks retained more moisture in the first few weeks of growth than the poor rocky ground in the 2 outer blocks. That sounded good to me BUT no said our expert. The easy to get at water in the middle sections made the roots lazy and weaker than the roots in the rocky areas. Thus the combination of weaker rootstock, delicate shoots in dark tubes and ……
4. …..hot days meant that we killed the vines.

Easy to see now with hindsight but probably, even with foresight, difficult to predict.

We are now recovering the situation with a new irrigation schedule of 16 litres of water every 7 days instead of 6 litres every 5 days. We are stripping off the tubes from the weaker vines now with the plan to have them all stripped by the end of March. Come winter we’ll cut back all the vines to 2 shoots and forget about the lost year, we’ll start again in September. We’ve ordered new vines and we’ll replace the dead ones in August. I must write to Johan W and confirm all this.

The Tempranillo field is being laid out now and this will be finished and the irrigation system extended by June ready for the planting in August/September. This time though we will let them grow into bushes (chickens) for the first year and only use tubes to protect from animals and chemicals – (if we need to). We’ll let nature take it’s pace.

Stripping and picking up tubes – Viognier field

• The statistics: 8 March - Day 125;
  425mm of irrigation/rain (very little of that is rain – as we’ve had the driest Dec, Jan, Feb for 10 years or more. Barely 10mm a month);
• 446 hours of good sunshine (whatever good is). Personally I think that the sunshine figure is understated by 100% at least as the software only registers sunshine hours if the ‘heat’ is greater than 75% of the max heat expected at this longtitude. The data logger however looks at lux (light) over a certain figure and logs that as sunshine hours and as such gives a number of hours almost 3 times what the heat hours are. I’m confused. I hope I haven’t confused anybody else.
• The 2257 vines that are doing well are bushing very nicely at the cordon wire. Close up pictures will follow.