Why Visit a Vineyard?

What I look for, and why they're not all boring

Vineyards are boring.

Perhaps that’s a surprising statement, coming from someone who spends a substantial amount of time walking amongst the vines. Let me qualify that a little. Most vineyards are boring, unless you happen to be a viticulturist or grower, to use the preferred term in the natural wine world, a botanist or a geologist.

What is a vineyard, after all? It’s a kind of outdoor factory for intensively farming grapes. A typical vineyard has 1,000s of near-identical plants – often all the exact same clone – arranged in rows. In the modern era, the vast majority are monocultures. They spend at least one third of the year looking like dead tree branches, before transforming buds into bunches of luscious fruit.

Vines hang out in some pretty dramatic locations mind. The Douro Valley, Santorini, the Mosel or Etna in Sicily all boast extraordinary scenery. But many of the world’s most famous wine regions are also the plainest. Anyone who has spent time in Champagne will know what I mean. It’s one of the dullest and flattest parts of France, not to mention one of the most chemically polluted. Bordeaux is similarly flat or undulating. Rioja isn’t so very different.

So why do wine geeks flock to the vines? When’s the last time you thought to visit the apple orchards of a cider producer or the wheat fields that supply your favourite baker? I’m guessing never. What makes vineyards different?

Perhaps it’s wine’s seasonal nature – it takes a whole year of nurture and care to produce a harvest. But the same goes for cider, bread and many other products of farming. Then there is the romantic idea of a stroll through the vines, fostered by a thousand films and marketing videos. Maybe in the summer, maybe in Tuscany. But mostly a vineyard is a workplace, just like a farm. Ok, old vines that have survived for 80, 90, 100 or more years get me hot under the collar. But that’s a minuscule part of the whole picture. Still, centuries of tradition have etched into our minds that vineyards are important, and we want to see them.

I could launch into a long essay on the effect of different soil and primary rocks types here. Wine geeks love to get their hands on slate, shale, schist, chalk, clay or whatever might be in the vineyard. Soil plays an important factor in the expression of wine. But this riff isn’t about that. I want to talk more about soil and plant health.

What I’m looking for

There are two overriding reasons why I like to start a winery visit with a little vineyard tour. First, it’s a great way to break the ice with the winemaker/grower. Serious artisanal producers tend to have a deep passion for their land and their vines. They wouldn’t be in the wine business otherwise. There are so many easier ways to earn a living. Taking a walk along the rows places them right in their comfort zone. You’re much more likely to strike up a lively conversation and establish a bond than if the visit begins next to a row of stainless steel tanks or sat in a sterile tasting room.

Second, and most important, is that eyeballing a grower’s vines can tell you a huge amount about how they work and where they stand philosophically. A picture tells a thousand words.

My entry point into the world of natural wine was organic agriculture, something I have passionately supported my entire adult life. I grew up in a farming community, and saw first-hand the difference between synthetic and more traditional methods of cultivation. My walk home from school crossed chemically treated wheat fields, which seemed like barren deserts compared to my parent’s vegetable plots which teamed with plant and insect life. I tasted the difference between a carrot sprayed with a pharmucopia of pesticides and synthetic fertilisers, and one that has seen only animal manure added to the soil. The first was bitter and tasteless, the second sweet and nourishing.

As wine became a consuming interest, I sought out those growers who shared my belief in farming for the planet, not just for profit. It remains my top priority, and that’s why I love to look at a producer’s vineyards.

By the 1970s, vine growing was heavily industrialised and led by the biochemical industry as every other type of farming. Herbicides were the new religion, eagerly adopted by farmers who realised they no longer had to spend time weeding or cutting the grass. The idea of a well-kept vineyard was bare, tilled earth between the rows, the vines protruding awkwardly from the frigid ground. I’ll never forget Luís Patrão (Vadio wines, Bairrada, Portugal) telling me how much he had to fight with his mother when he converted his vineyards to organic viticulture and encouraged wild plants to grow between the rows. “Your vineyards look so messy,” she complained, adding that for her, flowers belong in the garden and not in the vineyard. “What will the neighbours think?” she flustered.

Thankfully times have changed, and there’s been a generational shift. There is more and more awareness that ground cover – the growing of grasses, legumes and flowers – is not just beneficial, it’s something like essential to sustainable viticulture. Most vines need a bit of competition from other plants. If they don’t have to struggle, they overproduce. In hot regions, ground cover is vital to moderate temperatures. I’ve heard of a study done in the south of France where a difference of 10C was observed between a vineyard with bare earth and one with ground cover. The latter was, in other words, 10C cooler – a huge advantage for a part of the world where heat stress and sunburnt grapes are becoming common problems.

When I see a vineyard with ground cover, a smile already forms on my face. The next question is what’s growing there? Is there some evidence of biodiversity, with – depending on the time of year – a good variety of flowers and grasses? Many growers plant nitrogen-fixing legumes in addition to what grows naturally.

What I don’t want to see is scorched earth with burn marks marking the border with neighbouring vegetation - the tell-tail sign that glyphosates have been used. Some growers have adopted ground cover, but still spray herbicides directly under the vines. If there’s a slightly too-perfect bare rectangle under the plants, you can suppose this is the case. There are valid reasons for keeping the grass down in direct proximity to vines. In wetter or more humid regions, diseases such as oidium can be carried by other plants then cross-infect the vines. But there are many better and gentler solutions than spraying noxious chemicals.

Animals are the best labour force, for those who have the possibility. Sheep can keep the grass down to manageable levels, and I know some growers who allow their chickens or geese to do a similar job. Radovan Šuman, who farms biodynamically in wet Slovenian Styria, says “it is essential that animals touch every part of the vineyard”. Not only do his sheep act as gentle grass-cutters, he also wants their manure and “their energy – their lifeforce”.

Soil itself offers plenty of clues to the viticultural methods too. An organically or biodynamically farmed vineyard should be teeming with life. Worms and other insects help stop the soil from compacting. Healthy soil normally feels soft and pliable, notwithstanding very stony terroirs or dry seasons. Ground cover, again, is a game changer. Bare earth will get more and more compacted with every pass of the tractor. Eventually, it will neither absorb nor drain rainwater, as and when it comes.

The vines themselves will tell you whether all is well. Healthy vines won’t be covered with obviously diseased or shrivelled leaves during the growing season – they might look a bit sad just after harvest, but that is understandable. They’ve just been divested of their life-force for another year. Don’t be concerned if you see a dusty white bloom on the vine leaves – this just means the grower recently sprayed copper and sulphur, the two main elemental substances allowed under organic and biodynamic regulations.

Irrigation is another rabbit hole that I’ll try to cover briefly. Most conscious growers have come to the conclusion that vines have to get used to doing their own foraging for water. Even drip irrigation, done regularly, will lessen the vine’s instinct to send roots deep into the ground in search of moisture. I’ve seen the value of dry farming close up and personal in Swartland, South Africa. When I visited Jurgen Gouws (Intellego) in 2016, it was in the middle of a 10 year long drought. His vines, organically farmed without any irrigation, were surviving and producing fantastic fruit - albeit small quantites. He encouraged them to be strong.

The taps were quite literally turned off in South Africa at times over the last few years. Water is a scarce resource that’s getting scarcer in many parts of the world. When I see black hosepipes tacked along a row of vines, I start wondering about the justification. Some day soon, all vines will have to be weaned off irrigation.

If you are a true wine geek, you can rate the grower’s (or their team’s) pruning abilities too. A well pruned vineyard should look fairly consistent from plant to plant (very old vines that have seen multiple pruning philosphies over the generations might be an exception). Vines with huge, ugly protrusions of cuts and stumps can be an indication of unsympathetic pruning.

Philosophies are changing when it comes to summer pruning and green harvesting. The latter was considered essential for quality wine production in the 1990s and on, but more and more growers seek to let their vines find a natural equilibrium where they neither over or under-produce. As Jean-Michel Comme explained to me a few years ago, green harvesting just for the sake of it is a fatuous practice. The remaining bunches then tend to become oversized, with the risk that the centre of the bunch becomes too compact and starts to rot.

Summer pruning focuses on trimming the canopy to ensure that grapes get optimal exposure to the sun. Or, in warmer regions, it can be a case of protecting the grapes from getting scorched. Some growers now prefer to use ‘tie-backs’, where a vine’s shoots are just gently bent out of the way and then tied to each other – or to the training wire, if there is one. The approach is less invasive than giving the vine a haircut with the pruning shears.

Depending on the time of year, you can observe some or all of these practices to get an idea of where a grower sits on the intervention scale. Are they working very much “by the book”, in the traditional, interventionist manner, or striving for a more hands-off methodology where the vineyard and the vines themselves are gently coerced in the right direction rather than brutally shoe-horned into a formula dictated by the vineyard owner.

Priorities

It probably hasn’t gone unnoticed that I made a few value judgements here. Every grower and wine consumer has their own priorities and their own philosophy. Yours may or may not align with mine. In general, the more perfect a vineyard looks, the more uniform, primped and fussed over, the more sceptical I become.

I will never forget visiting the vineyards of Ewald Tscheppe, better known to the world as Werlitsch, in 2014. At first site, the vines looked abandoned. The field was a chaotic mess of tangled shoots, flowers and other wild plants. Yet these vineyards in Southern Styria produce some of the most sublime wines I’ve ever tasted.

It was an important lesson. Some of my favourite vineyards look more like wild gardens, with their own zen-like atmosphere. When nature is allowed to express itself without too much of a human straitjacket, it overflows with biodiversity, seeming randomness and unstoppable energy.

It is a beautiful sight. There is nothing boring about that.