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.