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.