Happy New Year!

A cop-out post, I know! However, we've been prepping for the big trip back to New Zealand, and enjoying having Christmas with my parents! So until I can get back to writing another entry, all the best for the New Year! I'll be celebrating with some nice local bubbly!

Cheers! :-)

China - the sleeping ice wine giant? (part 1)

Another chapter in the China travels series...

This time, its about something that was developed in Germany, really took off in Canada, and now it looks like China is poised to take over.

Ice wine. The luscious nectar made from frozen grapes, it is highly prized by some, and highly priced by many!!

Why is it so exclusive? To make the real stuff, the grapes need to be naturally frozen, and picked when the temperature is -8C or lower, and will stay that way until all the pressing is finished (these are Canadian rules - some other countries have their own regulations, but the Canadians seem to have the most comprehensive set, designed to ensure the integrity of their icewine (all one word, as opposed to the generic "ice wine" product)). That's pretty cold, and throw in the fact that it could be windy as well, and you're looking at a temperature of -16, easy, with the wind chill!

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to sit in a mechanical harvester and collect all those grapes into a hopper? It would be nice, but you wouldn't get many grapes that way, as by that time of the year, the cluster rachis has gotten brittle, and the berries fall off far too easily! So the grapes must be hand picked! Sometimes in the dark, when it's the coldest and to ensure that the grapes do not get above -8C. Similarly, the grape press is usually brought outside of the winery and the work done out in the cold. To make it even more difficult, extracting the juice from the grapes takes a long time, so the whole process is one big freeze-fest!

And just what is it about this procedure that results in such a luscious wine? It's a concentration effect. Pure water will start to freeze at 0C, so if you have water with something else in it, those other things won't freeze at that temperature.

So if you take a glass of juice (Kool-Aid was one of my favourites!), put it in the freezer and wait for a while - until it's partially frozen and there's quite a bit of ice in it, take it out and pour the remaining liquid into another glass. Now you have one glass that has ice in it, and another with the juice. If you actually do this, you'll note that the ice (if you wash off any remaining juice) is clear - not coloured like the juice. What you have there is pretty much pure water, which has been frozen out of the juice. If you taste the juice in the other glass, you should notice that it's a lot sweeter, and stronger tasting than the original juice - what you have done is concentrated the juice by freezing out some of the water in it.

The making of icewine uses the same principle. As the grapes freeze, ice forms inside the berry, but all the good stuff - the sugar and flavour compounds - are concentrated. So when the grapes are pressed, a concentrated sugary syrup of juice comes out, which can have twice the concentration of the original juice (the colder it is, the more concentrated the juice). This is what helps to make the wine sweet, and also have its intense aroma and flavour.

And this is why the temperature has to be so cold, and has to stay that way. If the grapes warm up, then there is not as much ice in the berries, and the juice won't have the same amount of concentration.

There aren't too many traditional grape growing areas that have sufficiently cold temperatures consistently, enough to make ice wine. As well, the temperatures can't get too cold, or the vines will freeze and die. Vitis vinifera, which is used to make the vast majority of wine in the world, can survive to around -18C if the conditions are right. So there is a relatively small window between cold enough and "*#!#%*! The vines are dead!!"

Germany was probably the first place where ice wine was made, but the conditions for good ice wine production aren't too common. The Niagara Peninsula, between Lakes Erie and Ontario in Canada is an area that seems to get appropriate conditions pretty well every year, even if they may have to wait until February before they arrive!

Those with quick minds would probably like to point out that this is all very inconvenient, so why not pick some grapes, stick them in a freezer, and press them in there - none of this mucking about in the cold, picking grapes, at least! This technique certainly works, but there is something about having those grapes hanging out there for so long before they're picked that helps to make the wine extra-special. The Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute at Brock University has done quite a bit of research into icewine production, and they are uncovering some of the factors that affect icewine quality - one of which is likely to be "hang-time" and freeze/thaw cycles.

So how does China come into this discussion? China, as I may have mentioned in passing before, is a big place. They have a huge spread of climates within the borders, and areas suitable for ice wine production are among the country's resources.

Book now for part 2 of China - the sleeping ice wine giant...

China and the Wine City -part 2

The second full day we had in Yantai, the Wine City, we were able to visit the International Wine City, Changyu, established in 2002 (so I was told, though another source suggested that it was in September 2008). This is what I described as the Disneyland of Chinese wine, covering 100ha. Uncountable great busloads of tourists (well, Changyu counts them, and told me that 100,000 visit per year, though the other source said it was as many as 1,000,000 in the first four months that it was open!) funnel through the gates to learn about winemaking, see the spectacle of grapevines growing, taste some wine and grapes and if they come at the right time of year, partake of harvest and even a bit of grape stomping! Entry is a nominal 30RMB each (about USD4.40 or NZD6.10), but the City is used as a way to get people interested in wine, and to learn more about how to appreciate it. They employ a (Western) sommelier to help with this by offering programmes on wine appreciation and the like.

The Grape Tasting Corridor in the Wine City. Here, patrons can sample grapes, wine, and nibble on biscuits, sweets and cheese.

On site is a museum, a huge Chateau, vineyards and of course, a sales room!

The Chateau in the Wine City - a massive and impressive building, meant to spar with the best that France has to offer

All very impressive, and yet, incongruous, as this City is situated in an Yantai industrial park near the south shore of Bohai Straight, between Bohai Sea and Korea Bay, where condominiums reach towards the stars...

Picturesque vineyards surrounded by massive condos, construction cranes and industrial offices

As a viticulturist, I was shocked by the virus status of the vines, which made the vineyards look like a patchwork of red and green. It seems that there is little clean material available, and no guidelines are in place to monitor and try to keep it out of the nurseries. In fact, that would do little to help, as most of the vine material being planted is simply collected from existing vines and poked into the soil. As I've noted before, the sandy soils aren't phylloxera-friendly, so own-rooted vines won't be beleaguered by the pest.

However, vine virus status aside, looking at the International Wine City with a marketing and tourism hat on, it was a marvel. There's no doubt that China is taking the whole wine experience to heart!

Cabernet Gernischt

One of the interesting varieties that I saw in China was this little fellow: Cabernet Gernischt. It is widely grown there, so much so, in fact, that "Jiebaina" (a phonetic equivalent to "Cabernet") has becoming a synonym for Cabernet Gernischt and blends of other Cabernets, much to Chang Yu Winery's chagrin, as they have wanted to lay claim to the name (see here for more details).

Do a search on the web and not a lot useful comes up. Wikipedia as a stub, and there are various entries by outfits selling the wine that comes from China, but there is little else available - not even my hardly-ever-fails-me Super Gigantic Y2K Grapevine Glossary, by A.J. Hawkins has an entry for it!!

Most sources agree that the variety was brought to China (ChangYu lays claim to this, in particular) in the late 1800s, and that it no longer appears to be grown in Europe. The authors of the Wikipedia entry claim that it is the same variety as Cabernet franc, but I'm not convinced about this. I tasted it while in China, and think it's sufficiently different, and as well, there is some scientific evidence that Cabernet Gernischt is not the same as Cabernet Sauvignon or Cabernet franc (see the article by Jiang et al., 2007).

I was told that the non-vintage Cabernet Gernischt is ChangYu's top selling red wine, and that they make 20,000 tonnes worth of it every vintage. That's about a sixth of their present production! I can see why - it's a very pleasant wine - not as big as a Cab Sauv, but a nice accompaniment to an every-day meal. Big less dainty than a Cab franc, but with nice fruit, spice and a hint of perfume.

There is also interest in making a lower-alcohol version of the wine, with Qingdao (better known for its beer than its wine!) coming out with a 9% alcohol version (via reverse osmosis).

Is it possible that this long-lost native of Europe could make a foray back into the West? Never say never!!

China and the Wine City -part 1

The traditional heart of China's wine production is Yantai, a coastal city which is in the Shandong Province, southeast of Beijing. My visit to Yantai was sponsored by Chang Yu Winery, who were large sponsors of the Yantai International Wine Festival, of which the third edition was happening during our visit. As usual, everything is larger in China - even the wine bottles!

At the opening of the Wine Festival. The third incarnation was the biggest and splashiest yet!

You thought things were bigger in Texas? Try China on for size!!

The region is very proud of this international-scale event, which was launched with no small amounts of fanfare. It is aimed primarily at the trade, rather than the buying public, but there were lots of representatives of each group there.

Very little expense spared here - dancers, music, confetti

and parachute-filled cannons, smoke and loud bangs!

Of the interesting things that we saw there was a display of some wines from Central Otago, New Zealand, and also that Chang Yu has a Chateau in New Zealand, where they make the ChangYu Kely brand of wines - a Sauvignon blanc and a Merlot. The vineyard is located in the north - Kaitaia, which is northwest one of the areas first planted with vines in New Zealand, way back in the early 1800s. The winery is Kari Kari Estate, who make a range of wines, and feature one Karl Coombes as Assistant Winemaker - he did the Graduate Diploma in Viticulture and Oenology at Lincoln University in 2007! The Merlot was selling for 298RMB and the Savvie for 318RMB (at the exchange rates at the time, that equated to approximately USD44 and USD47, respectively). In New Zealand dollars, we're talking about $61 and $65, resp. per bottle! Not bad for a bottle that would retail for maybe NZD20 for the Savvie and NZD30 for the Merlot!

Bottle and packaging for ChangYu Kely Sauvignon blanc, sister to the Merlot
also sold under the brand in China.

I was pretty chuffed that the largest winery in China thought that it was worthwhile to have New Zealand wine in their portfoilio, which also favours wines from the Old World as well!!

China and expansion

Did I already mention that China is a big place? With a whole lotta people in it?

The country is opening up in a lot of ways -social, economic, science, and there is a growing group of people that can afford wine, but they haven't necessarily had it before. There are also a relatively high number of rich, who can afford very expensive (and usually French) wine, but of most interest to the domestic wine industry are those that are doing well, but not well enough to be called rich. You know, like the middle-class.

They know something about wine, probably on the order of, that it's something that rich people and foreigners drink, and that piques their interest enough to try it, or they might want to emulate the rich to climb the social ladder (what silly games we people play sometimes! :-)

So even though a small percent of people with the income buy wine, and only a fraction of those buy wine very often, because the absolute numbers are so big, it equates to a heap of wine being consumed domestically.

So, I've mentioned what they're doing on the vineyard side of things - planting large areas of grapes, but to accommodate those grapes, you need wineries to process them and make them into wine!

So I visited a few wineries there as well. The largest and most impressive was a brand new facility built by Chang Yu to service the large area of vineyards they had planted in the Yinchuan area. The finishing touches on the place were being done when we went through, and it was impressive to see a 20,000 tonne winery being put up, just like that!

Red wine tanks lined up all in a row.

Row upon row of tanks, one section devoted to whites, and the rest to reds (more reds than whites are made, by a large margin). The tanks for the latter had motorised stirrers built into the bottom to aid with extraction, and all had a chute by the door that the must could be pushed out and onto a conveyor which augers the skins and seeds to the presses.

The auger system they put in place to ferry the red must to the presses after fermentation. Keeping this clean will be a challenge!

Sorry, no two-tonne open-top fermenters here!!

While I've seen bigger wineries, I haven't seen one of this size going into a completely new viticultural region. Obviously, the company has big plans for wine from there!

The new Chang Yu Visitors Centre in Yinchuan -this building is dwarfed by the winery! When they do things, they do them big!

China -viticulture to the west

In this installment, I'm going to describe a few things that I saw in the Ningxia province, near its capital city, Yinchuan.

Yinchuan is known as a rural city, it having a population of "only" around one million people. It is an extremely spread out city, with incredibly straight roads that go long distances. One road runs for 40km through the city and is dead straight all the way!

The areas near Yinchuan are viticulture growth areas, as the climate there is thought to be well suited to wine production. The history goes back a bit, with a 1984 wine being recognised as the first white wine made in Ningxia. There are some good reasons to have grapes growing here - supposedly it has the second highest number of sunshine hours per year, second only to Tibet, which is probably a bit too harsh of an area! However, the same drawback are here - it's so cold and dry during the winter that the vines must be buried each autumn. A major headache, even in this land of plentiful labour.

Rainfall is only 200mm per year, but it can occur pretty much all at once! The wettest months on average are July through December, so right during the grape ripening season!

The soils are very sandy, so phylloxera is not yet a problem (it has been found in the Shandong province and in the areas around Beijing), and thus most vines are own-rooted, propagated by cuttings taken from another vineyard (which has meant the spread of virus has been wide and far!). Soil pH can be very high before amendment - 8.9!!

The soil in a vineyard near Yinchuan - pure sand!

I was told that there are about 5000 hectares of grapes in Ningxia, and a good yield for the red varieties they like to grow is in the range of 22 tonnes per hectare, which is very high!! Although the rows are reasonably far apart, the between vine spacing is very close.

Vines in the Chateau Helan vineyard, with the Helan Mountains in the background. Vines are very closely spaced, with the vertical trunks being laid down along the row in the Autumn, before being covered with soil.

All in all, a very different area to grow grapes!!

China -the first days

Just to join those that say you can't go to China on a business trip and not take in some of the other great things to do there, here I go!

I got to China on a Tuesday afternoon, arriving at the gate on time at about 3:15pm. However, it was a long wait to get through immigration. The airport is astounding in its scope! The terminal I arrived in was built for the 2008 Olympics and accommodate the flocks of people attending the event, but I could not have prepared myself for the magnitude of its size. It is an impressive complex!

The next two days were a whirlwind of touristy visits, including the Great Wall, which is a marvel, but it's disappointing to know that the sections that most tourists see are reconstructed out of stone, when the originals were much different. As only relatively small sections have been done up for the tourists, there are still original remants that you can see. Although we didn't get to see any of these near Beijing, they are nearby. Still, the reconstructed wall is not to be missed. What I was impressed with was the steepness of sections of it. There was no giant earth moving machinery in those times, so wherever the ground was, the wall was built. Amazing to think of the amount of effort that went into it!

We also visited Tiananmen Square, the last day before it was closed to the public in preparation for the 60th anniversary celebrations, the Forbidden City, which is an immense site filled with more things to see than you could possibly fit into a single day, and the Summer Palace, which seemed appropriately palatial!

These sights, along with an impressive array of diverse foods, got us off to a rocking start!

Oh, and yes, we did actually view something grapevine-y! We were lucky enough to be able to visit Chateau Nubes, which is a winery yet to be opened, but is among quite a few start-ups (around 60) that are appearing in the area near Beijing/the Great Wall in order to capture some of the tourism market.

The courtyard of the unfinished winery. Underneath this area are the underground cellars.


No small outfit is this - the building is being made out of local stone, as per the native traditions of the area, and vast underground tunnels will hold the wine for ageing and various functions. The vineyards were young, and as the winters are harsh, with cold and wind-blown sand, all vines (own-rooted) are buried over the dormant season (more on this later!).

This is one of the three year old Cabernet Sauvignon vines in the vineyard. The irrigation water runs right under the vines. The main trunk is buried in the winter months. The cane to the left of the photo could be used as a replacement trunk.

The vineyards will eventually cover 50 hectares, but only 20 had been planted so far. Rainfall is only 200-400mm per year, so the vines are irrigated by furrow. The soil is basically sand (this was all desert, after all!) with a relatively thin layer of topsoil. Harvest of the approximately 6t/ha happens in mid-October, about the same time as the frosts arrive, funnily enough. All they had bearing at the time was Cabernet Sauvignon, which was in its third leaf this season.

Looking down the rows - note that the soil is hilled up in the centre - the soil that is used to cover the vines in the winter needs to go somewhere! This also limits the row spacing, as if it is too narrow, there isn't enough soil available to cover the vines!

One nice thing about the area is that at present, there is little problem with fungal disease, with copper sulfate for Downy Mildew control being used occasionally.

So on these first days we were exposed to the magnitude of China's largest city and its key tourist attractions, but also to the potential boom in wineries in the area around Beijing. The real estate agent's mantra, "location, location, location!" applies here as elsewhere - you need to be near the market! With lots of wineries popping up near Beijing, there are quite a few new businesses that are hoping tourist dollars (and curiously, the government, which buys a lot of wine to give as gifts) will help their wineries grow.

Frost in the late throes of ripening

Just a quick note about late season frosts, while they're happening in Niagara. In New Zealand, early season frosts are a common problem, but not so much late season ones. I've already written about the use of wind machines in the dormant season (Aug14), but this season Niagara is in the situation of having many grapes (Chardonnay, Riesling, Cabernet franc, Syrah...) still out on the vines, and yet temperatures are dipping to below zero.

One reasonably strong frost event can kill all the green leaves on the vines, which means that the ripening process effectively stops (a small amount of sugar may accumulate in the berries due to the vines dipping into their carbohydrate reserves, which isn't good for long term vine health, sugar concentration may increase due to berry shrivelling, and then there may be small changes to acidity and flavour). Leaving the fruit on the vine won't help when you're trying to make normal table wines (icewines are a special case!), and if the vine tries to push a bit more sugar into the fruit using its reserves, it will be less resistant to cold temperatures during the winter, and may suffer a bit in the early season following.

So the fruit has to come off, ready or not!

To prevent the leaves from making an early departure, the wind machines can be used (providing there is an appropriate inversion layer) to keep the temperature dipping below zero, and keeping the leaves on the vines so they can photosythesise a bit more, hopefully ripening the fruit.

Even though the daytime temperatures are cool at best right not, there can be a significant amount of activity in the vines and fruit if it's sunny. The sun's radiation can heat fruit and the leaves to above the air temperature, so enzymes can be rockin' along quite nicely if it's not overcast or too windy.

Ironically, clear skies and lack of wind are exactly the kind of conditions under which frosts form, so what you want during the day isn't what you want and night!

We're keeping our finger's crossed for still air and sunshine during the day and clouds and a gentle breeze at night!!

China!

Well, there has been a delay since the last post, and there something of a passable reason for this! For about two weeks I was traveling through parts of China (my first visit there), doing some touristy things as well as some looking at vineyards and wineries.

To say that a visit to the country was an eye-opener would be a vast understatement! In fact, "vast" is a good term to use when talking about it, since it covers a huge geographical spread, as well as in reference to its population!

As some background to the trip, I was invited there by a visiting scientist, Changbing Song, who works at the Northern Nationals University in Yinchuan, Ningxia. This is about 1100km west-southwest of Beijing. Changbing visited me in New Zealand in 2008 to do some research, and kindly was able to bring me to China (with the assistance of the China Foreign Experts Bureau) to give a couple of seminars and view the industry there. In addition, some others sponsored my time in Beijing (Professor Changquing Duan of China Agricultural University) and in Yantai (Changyu Wine Group).

In addition, also invited on the tour was Wen-feng (Regon) Hung, who is a PhD candidate at Lincoln University, and who helped Changbing quite a bit while he was in New Zealand. As well, Regon's PhD research involves wine protein stabilisation, and he was to present his work on the tour as well.

It also helped me greatly in that since Regon was from Taiwan, he could speak the language, whereas I could only speak a few words! Though I am half-Chinese (with my Mom coming from the Sichuan Province), I never took an opportunity to learn the language. So I am deeply indebted to Regon for all his hard work in translating and looking after me!

So with that background, I can begin to relate my China trip experiences and observations... in the next post!! (sorry!)

mmmm... beer!

Ok, yes, I'm a wine fan. I love trying out new and different wines! But hey, it's not the only fermented beverage worth looking at! :-)

They say that it takes a lot of beer to make good wine, so to help everyone make better wine, try this beauty, which I was served recently:

Innis & Gunn Original Oak Aged Beer

Talk about fusion of wine making and beer making! The oak lends a heartiness to the beer that is outstanding! Give it a try (as long as you're of legal drinking age, that is!! :-)

Blue is the colour of my true love's ... grapevine??

There are big differences between growing grapes here in Ontario versus good 'ol New Zealand. When you move from one place to another, sometimes they stick out like a sore thumb.

Case in point: Off-colour grapevines. Driving around Niagara you may come across vines looking like the picture on the right.

This rather sickly shade is from a copper and lime solution, called Bordeaux Mixture by some, that is applied to the vines to keep diseases at bay. For grapes, it is an effective control for Powdery Mildew and Downy Mildew, but it is used in a wide variety of crops for fungal and bacterial diseases. See this UC Davis page for more information.

The history around Bordeaux Mix is worthy of discussion, and was included in the book my Dad and I wrote (<shameless_plug> Grapes, published by CAB International, and available at a variety of bookstores, including Amazon.com </shameless_plug> ):

"Downey Mildew, imported with the American Grapevine material that was used to combat Phylloxera, was first reported in France in 1878 and caused another downturn in French grape production until a control method was found. The story goes that a grower just outside the village of Bordeaux was having trouble with townspeople stealing grapes as they walked by his vineyard (Prial, 1987). He decided to paint the clusters near the road with a greenish-blue paste made by mixing copper sulfate and lime, which gave the leaves and fruit and unappetizing splotchy green-blue colour. It is not reported if this deterred the pilfering, but a passing scientist observed that the grapes did not develop Downy Mildew. A few enquiries and experiments later, in 1885, he published resutls that showed the effectiveness of this bouilli bordelaise (Bordeaux mixture), and it is still used around the world for control of Downy Mildew as well as other disease organisms."

Bordeaux mix is approved for use in Organic and Biodynamic growing as well, and it is an important tool to being able to control Downy Mildew in particular in those systems, as Powdery Mildew can also be controlled with sulfur.

One issue with its use is that it does add copper to the soil, so with long term application (decades and decades) to the vines, the amount of copper in the soil can get too high, resulting in less productive vineyards. So like anything else, it must be used with intelligence and restraint.

Winegrowers are well aware of the challenges of using Bordeaux mixture and use it as only a part of a well-designed disease management programme.

Harvesting table grapes in Upstate New York

I've been lucky enough to be able to visit my parents when they are harvesting their table grapes - not so easy most of the time when they are in Upstate New York and I live in New Zealand!!

So I thought some info on growing and selling table grapes might be in order!

In the world of wine grapes, berry composition is king. The goal is to get those berries to the proper chemical and sensory levels, as well as being free of disease.

For table grapes the goals are all these, but also there is an appearance issue. So my parents need to be very careful about spraying anything that might leave a visible residue on the grapes. In some cases, this might preclude using certain types of sprays!

As well, the presence of an undisturbed bloom on the grape (this is a waxy coating on the berry which, when untouched, makes the berries look a bit white. If it's rubbed the berry goes shiny) is also desirable. This means the less the fruit is handled, the better!

Then you get into the shape of the bunch, which needs to be something like a nice stereotypical grape cluster, not some really small, scrawny or lopsided thing. As well, the clusters can't be too tight (that makes it difficult to pick the berries off when you want to eat one) or too loose (as then it doesn't look filled out enough and too leggy). Packing tight clusters is also a problem, as they aren't flexible enough to fit into conventional 20lb boxes (i.e. if you fill a box with tight clusters, the weight will be less than 20lbs).

So picking table grapes is a much more labour intensive process than wine grapes. Sure, with ultra-premium wine grapes, you will be doing some sorting in the field, such as removing diseased clusters and not picking second set and the like, but with table grapes, every imperfect berry should be removed from the cluster.

This means grapes that are too small, blemished in some way (sunburn, bit of sooty mold etc.), bird pecked, diseased or anything else must be snipped off. In some cases, this can result in a large, nicely shaped cluster when it comes off the vine being trimmed down to a scruffy looking scrag of a cluster, not suitable for the market.

In any case, there is a lot more attention paid during the harvesting process, and even during the growing season special considerations have to be made.

The returns can be pretty high, but if you don't have the labour to do all the work, it's all pretty academic, isn't it? :-)

The fruit my parents' grow is all seedless, varieties bred in Upstate New York, at the Geneva Experiment Station, and also a few other places, like Arkansas, which has released a number of varieties. The main difference these grapes have over those typically found in the grocery store is that they are bursting with flavour!!

So which would I rather be? A winegrape grower, or a table grape grower? Hmm, Table grapes are nice, but not as nice as wine!! :-)

Messy looking vineyards

While travelling around vineyards in the Niagara Peninsula and also Upstate New York, one of the things that could strike a person used to New Zealand vineyards is that the vineyards are all pretty untidy.

The contrast is that in New Zealand, virtually all the vineyards are two or four-cane vines on vertical shoot positioned (VSP) trellises. the fruit is concentrated near the bottom of the canopy on the vine, and the shoots are all supposed to be trained up. Aside from this, the sides and tops of the canopy are trimmed mechanically to give the vines a nice, neat hedge-like appearance.


Where we are now, the majority of the vineyards are VSP, but there are still lots of shoots going everywhere, up, sideways, down, over etc.

I maintain that one of the reasons that VSP is such a popular trellising system is that it can result in a very neat looking vineyard, which appeals to people's eyes. After all, most of us would take the time to make sure the plants in our gardens look tidy, trimmed and well looked after. What will people think about the state of a vineyard if it isn't in the same kind of shape? (I will have to write later about the pros and cons of a tidy-looking vineyard versus an unkept one! :-)

So what reasons can I come up with for the difference in vineyard appearance between NZ and here?

Well, one reason is the amount of rain that's fallen here this season. By all accounts, it has been a wet year, with much more rain than usual. This means the vines have access to a lot of water, which encourages vegetative growth. So at this time of season, when the grapes are starting to colour up and get into the ripening phase, we would normally expect that the grass between the rows has browned off, and the vine shoots to have stopped growing due to the lack of water.

So because the vines are growing a lot more, it means that to maintain the neat and tidy appearance of all the rows requires more work, for the same end result (this being the quality of the grapes being harvested). If there aren't enough resources (and with the economic downturn, this is a hard reality for a lot of businesses!) to go through and do all the necessary shoot positioning, lateral removal, leaf pulling and trimming, the vines start to look a bit hairy.

So this is one possible reason for the vines not looking like they do in all the coffee-table wine books laying around!

So would NZ vineyards look like this if there was above-average rainfall? Yes, they would. However, this is less likely, as most of the vineyards in New Zealand do not get enough rainfall to support vines through the year, so they have irrigation systems put in, to deliver supplemental water. So even if we have above average rainfall, it may not mean that the vines have luxury amounts of water available to them, and therefore the vegetative response is not the same as it is around here.

Wind Machines

Since I'm here in Ontario for a while, one does get to touring around vineyards (and wineries!) a bit.

In NZ, wind machines are popping up all over the viticultural landscape, as the most common type of frost occurring in the spring are radiation frosts. Something that moves the air can be very effective in avoiding freeze damage to the vines, because in such a frost cold air develops near the ground, but warmer air accumulates on top of that cold air. This is called an inversion layer, with the warm air stacked on top of the cold.

A wind machine sticks up far enough above the ground (say, 10m) to draw this warmer air down and mix it with the colder air. In most cases, there is a significant reservoir of heat in the inversion layer, meaning that the mixed air is warm enough to prevent freezing of the vine tissues for many hours.

Helicopters are also used to mix the cold and warm layers, but if a vineyard is in a location that is hit consistently with frosts, it can be worth the capital cost to buy, install, and maintain the fans.

So in NZ there are a lot of wind machines being put in to help manage spring freeze events, but here in the Niagara region, they are also putting them in. However, spring frosts are not so much of a concern here (due to the general climate and also the location of the vineyards). So why are people investing in these expensive machines?

Here the main problem is freezing temperatures during the dormant season. Grapes can be very hardy plants, surviving very low temperatures (for certain species, this can be down to less than -40 degrees C!), but vinifera vines tend to be more tender, with a critical temperature of around -18C. So if the temperature in a region tends to get lower than this on a regular basis, you had better have some methods to manage the vines to prevent damage!

One method relies on the presence of the inversion layer, which can appear in the middle of winter as well as in the early spring (or autumn). By mixing the air, freezing temperatures low enough to damage dormant vine tissues can be avoided, leading to productive vines the next season. Without some form of protection, crop losses can be 100 percent, with the added burden of having to re-train the vines (if you're lucky) or re-plant them (if you're not lucky!).

I will write on other strategies to avoid winter freeze damage in another post...

Good fruitset can equal bad news

Whilst working with some grapevines the other day I was reminded about the problems of having excessively tight clusters. Pinot noir is well known for this, but can be the case for many varieties if you have good conditions at fruit set. It can cause clusters to become so tightly packed as the berries grow and approach harvest, that berries can be popped off the cluster, causing fresh wounds where disease can get established.

As well, tight clusters are undesirable as the interior of the cluster then becomes a very good place for disease organisms to get started, as any pesticide sprays, which are a necessity to producing quality wines in some growing regions, cannot reach inside the cluster.

So while high yields are thought to be a good thing, if this is due to very good fruit set, you can run into problems, usually disease related, later on.

What are some answers to this problem?

As always, when talking about disease control, spray coverage is the most important aspect of fungicide effectiveness. Even if you have the best fungicide in the universe, it isn't any good unless it is delivered to the target. So making sure the sprayer is set up correctly, the nozzles are delivering the appropriate volume of spray and in the correct pattern, the ground speed of the tractor isn't too fast (or slow!) and the canopy is open enough to receive the spray are all important to disease control.

Aside from this, if you have good fruit set, applying a fungicide before the cluster closes up (that is, before the berries swell so much that there is no longer any airflow into and through the cluster) is your best bet to minimising disease later in the season.

If you are in an area known to have high disease pressure in the grapes themselves, choosing a variety or clone that has a more open cluster can be another effective tool.

If you must, absolutely, grow a tight clustered Pinot noir clone in this sort of area and the price you will get for the wine warrants it, then you could consider gibberellin application (if this is an approved chemical for your crop) prior to flowernig - this will cause the rachis to elongate, and thus make the cluster looser.

Another option is to do flower thinning, where flowers are removed prior to flowering. This can be done with comb-like devices, which remove some, but not all the flowers on the cluster.

In some cases, you could also trim the bottom of the flower cluster off, which allows a bit more freedom for berries to poisition themselves.

Early leaf removal has also been experimented with, where the reduced photosynthesis caused by this results in less fruit set.

These last few, though, have traditionally been done before flowering, developed for the table grape industry, where a tight cluster is one that is difficult to remove grapes from and also to pack into shipping containers.

For wine grapes, berry thinning and cluster trimming could be done after fruit set, when you have some idea of whether it was too good or not. This helps since you never really know if a season is going to provide good fruit set or not!

For ultra-premium production, where yields are often kept to very low levels, a reduction in crop is a normal occurrence, and the loss of crop through these methods can result in higher grape quality than through cluster thinning.

Minimal stock sandwich makers

While travelling with my father in law we stopped for a late lunch at a pizza place in western New York. We both ordered a sub sandwich with different meats, but lettuce, tomato etc. Shortly afterwards, one of the people in the shop went out the door and, as we later discovered, down the mall to the Tops supermarket. Minutes later, she returned with a Tops shopping bag that had lettuce, tomato and onion in it, which was then used to make our sandwiches!

Admittedly, the sandwiches were tasty and the bread was nicely toasted in the pizza oven, but we thought it odd that they had to go out once the order was placed to get some of the sandwich fixings!!

Coming back to the Northeast

Some notes about impressions of coming back to the Northeast after over 20 years away (egads, has it been that long??). Yes, it's been a wet summer, but there have been a lot of thunderstorms, which is something that was quite rare in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, in Wagga Wagga, Australia, and Christchurch, New Zealand where I've been living since moving away for graduate school.

I've missed them!

The flashes of light and the resulting thunder bring back memories of summers past, and are a demonstration of the power and majesty of nature.

As well, we have the dancing lights of lightning bugs, which I remember chasing and collecting in glass jars when I was young. We don't have these in Australia or in New Zealand and I can't wait for my kids, aged (almost) eight and ten, to see them!

We're live!

I start writing this blog as I am on a study leave from my adopted home New Zealand. I am researcher and lecturer at Lincoln University near Christchurch, but am here in St Catharines Ontario for about six months in total, working with Andy Reynolds of Brock University's Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute.

St Catharines is less than a half-hour from Niagara Falls, and thus is near to my hometown of Ithaca New York, so I know what the climate is like, at least: hot and humid in the summer, bitterly cold and dry in the winter!

I am a grapevine physiologist by training, at Cornell University and Oregon State University, and viticulture is one of my main interests, both academically and personally! I hope, with this blog, to keep a bit of a record of my travels while on this study leave, jot down notes about viticulture, wines, ideas, life and more (I think that about covers it!).