Good leaf cover up top and moisture in the soil below is setting up our Hawke’s Bay vineyards for a great run-up to the 2021 harvest.
“The rain we had in November has provided good soil moisture. Together with warm weather, this has created a lush canopy and our task now is to ensure that we get enough sun and wind exposure for the grapes,” says Hawke’s Bay Viticultural Manager Tony Smith.
While the vineyard staff are trimming the vines and plucking leaves, the vines are working hard to start pushing the grape berries through veraison. This process, during which the berries change colour – from green to black in red varieties and golden in white varieties. At the same time, the grapes become softer and sweeter. Veraison has just started and will run a few more weeks.
“The drier we can keep the grapes until harvest, the better,” Tony says.
With some wet weather in the long-term forecast, the team are bracing to set up the vines to dry quickly once the rain has passed.
“All we can do now is trim, pluck … and pray!”
We’re going underground with the slogan: “Water to the roots!”
Because, when you think about it, where you really want the water for your vines is underground, where the roots are.
That’s why the drip lines on our new vineyard development on Selmes Road, Marlborough, are being installed 300mm below the soil surface.
Burying your irrigation system does bring some challenges, such as the apertures becoming clogged with roots as they seek a direct line to the water source. To keep the roots at bay, the apertures are impregnated with copper. Laying pipe underground is also slightly more expensive than stringing the irrigation lines above ground, as we currently do. So why bother?
It’s all to achieve greater sustainability.
For one thing, we’ll reduce our water use, because less of it will evaporate. With the top layer of the soil being drier, there also won’t be so much to feed the shallow roots of weeds. With less weed growth, we can save on driving machinery up and down our vineyard rows. And we can further cut down our use of sprays.
On top of that, having our drip lines underground will also mean less (accidental) damage to the pipes by machinery, and less (very deliberate!) damage to the pipes by rabbits.
The plan is to retrofit more vineyard blocks with underground drip-lines over time, especially our expanding organic vineyard holdings.
For most of us, the festive season is a time to sit back, pour a glass of wine and enjoy a relaxed time with friends and family. But not if it’s your job to look after next year’s wines…
The same summer heat that signals lazy days for some, brings about heaps of activity in the vineyard. In fact, it’s even busier than harvest itself, with the vines flowering and berries starting to develop.
With the long summer days, the vines grow like crazy. We need to keep the foliage in check – leave enough leaves to power the development of our grapes, but not so much that the grapes get too little air or light. Grape berries need good airflow to be healthy and sunlight to ripen well.
Weeds love the summer heat just as much as our vines do, so they grow rapidly too. And, while we like plants in general, we rather favour our vines, and want them to get first dibs at the water and nutrients in the soil. So, we have to keep the weeds under control.
It may not sound like that much, until you factor in that if you were to string our vines in a single row, we’ll easily be able to cover the entire distance from Cape Reinga to Bluff!
None of this vineyard work can be postponed, not if we want to make sure you can again enjoy some delicious glasses of Babich wine next Christmas!
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Our winemakers are determined to do less and less work, especially on our organic wines.
“We want the fruit and the vineyard to express themselves with as little as possible
interference from us winemakers,” says Marlborough Winemaker Jens Merkle.
With the single exception of Sauvignon Blanc, all of the organic wines we make are fermented with wild yeast. With all inputs having to be organic, organic wine limits the options available to the winemakers. But we’ve gone beyond that, deciding not to use any animal products in the winemaking process at all, which means that since the 2019 vintage, all Babich organic wines are vegan as well!
The next step would be not to filter the wines at all. This year, we’re considering it for our Albariño, but it could be applied more widely in future. Since we made our first organic wine in 2009, these wines have often been something of a testing ground for ideas we later implement in our conventional winemaking too.
Our organic range of six wines also includes some lesser known varieties, such as Albariño and Grüner Veltliner.
Offering wine lovers these options fits with the idea of diversity, which starts in the vineyard. In our organic vineyards, we promote a greater diversity of plant and insect life, so why not do it in the wine varieties as well?
Babich’s leading efforts in organic winemaking continues to be recognised internationally. We were just awarded Marlborough Organic Winery of the Year at the 2020 New York International Wine Competition.
You can’t hear it, but all over our vineyards, engines are starting up. They run more quietly than electric engines, and they’re greener. Literally.
The leaves that are growing at the moment are the engine of the vine. They convert the sun’s energy into carbohydrates that power the plant.
Currently, they’re producing florets – the beginning of flowers that will later develop into bunches of grapes. When the grapes start forming, the leaves will power them to grow and sweeten.
“Our focus is to grow grapes, not an overabundance of leaves,” says Tony Smith, our viticultural manager in Hawke’s Bay. “We have to keep the engine running, so we can grow the grapes we want, but not running so fast that we get too much leaf.”
Water acts like fuel to an engine, and by moderating the amount of water the vine gets, our viticulturists can slow down or speed up leaf growth, helping to keep the vine in balance.
The leaf runs on water that it gets from the roots and releases through tiny pores called stomata. In the exchange of gases on the leaf surface, the leaf combines carbon dioxide with water to create carbohydrates. This, in turn, gets converted into growth – of shoots and leaves, but importantly also of florets and, later in the season, grape berries.
And all this production happens so quietly that you can hear the wind rustle through the leaves. Pretty magical!
He’s a wild one, but we like his character. So, we’re making Barry one of the winemaking team in our Marlborough winery.
He has been around since we opened the winery in 2014, always trying to get involved. We gave him some juice to play with right from the start, and he has proved to us that he can make wine that is at least as good as that made by more cultured peers. So, now we’re giving him more and more to do.
Barry got his name from Laura Stringer, microbiologist at the winery. Because Barry isn’t a person, but a strain of wild yeast. His name is derived from Babich Retained Yeast.
“All wineries have wild yeast in them, and we’re lucky that ours is a good one,” says Marlborough winemaker Jens Merkle. “We have found that the wines Barry makes have great depth and density, with an appealing aromatic profile. They are often more complex than the ones made with commercial yeast.”
Also, using Barry saves cost and has environmental benefits, as he doesn’t require transport or packaging.
You have probably been drinking some of Barry’s work without knowing it. Barry has a hand in most of our organic wine, and often in the Black Label and Winemakers’ Reserve wines.
“We’re still working on it,” says Jens, “but you can expect us to entrust more of our wine to Barry in future.”
For everything there is a season. There was a season for stripping down the vineyard – pruning the vines right back to lay the groundwork for the new growth to come. With the vines taken care of, we are shifting our focus to prepare the vineyard environment for the coming summer growth.
Part of what we do is maintenance – to make sure everything works as it should – and part is to improve what we have. Just as we want to improve wine quality year on year, we want our vineyards to be better and healthier.
To give our vines the best of everything over the growth season, our vineyard teams are going through the vineyard to make sure that all the drip lines are working the way they should, so that we can help the vines cope when it becomes too dry in summer. We’re also doing soil tests, to see if the vines will have the nutrients they’ll need.
With the vines’ food and drink sorted, we’re looking at the things we’ll need, such as the condition of roads through the vineyard, and the machines that will use them. These all get serviced.
When the time comes, we want to have all the tools ready to make sure we can get the vines to produce grapes of the best quality and desired quantities – so that there will be enough for everyone, and of a quality you’ll enjoy.
It’s spring, and on our vineyards, they’re preparing for the cold.
Why? Because the dormant vines in winter could withstand low temperatures, but once the buds show on the canes, a frost can finish them off. With potentially disastrous effects for our next harvest.
Budburst usually comes at the end of September, early October, bringing a time when the new growth is vulnerable and needs careful tending.
We cannot put the woolly buds on the vines into woolly blankets, but we can do other things to protect them from frosts. One thing is to keep the grass in the vineyard short, so that the soil can absorb the sun’s heat and radiate it at night.
If more is needed, we have frost fans on most of our vineyards. As the heavy, cold air sinks to the ground and pools in low-lying areas, the fans pull warmer air from higher up and blows it down, mixing it with the cold air to dilute its bite.
If that’s still not enough, we bring in helicopters to do the same job – at higher cost and potentially in less frost-prone areas not equipped with frost fans.
For the next ten weeks, our vineyard teams will keep their alarms with them. If the temperature on a vineyard drops to dangerous levels, they have to go out and brave the cold to protect next year’s harvest.
It’s tough, but next year when you taste the wine, you’ll know it was worth it.
