Our vines range in age from kindergarten to retirement (4-60 years old). In their early years vines need careful management to give them a long and healthy life – protecting their trunks, restricting growth and maintaining low grape yields. It’s a very labour intensive business more so when you’re dealing with vines that have been left to their own devices for a while. Our plantation of young Braucol was quite a sad sight when we arrived.
To recover the plantation (0.6 Hectares) was a big exercise for us. We got advice from our viticultural expert on how to prune the vines taking them right back to only 2 buds on each plant. Using flexible tape we tied each vine to a tutor (narrow metal post) to straighten and support its trunk. We installed piquets and wires across the plantation to give more protection to the growing shoots and every few days we walked the parcel to pick up and re-tie slumped vines. We’ve spent hundreds of hours up on that patch this year and, you know what, now it looks like a vineyard – it’s saved. We’ll take things slowly to allow the vines to mature but in a couple of years we should get really decent grapes.