News & Press

Vineyard Organics - 20 Jul 15

As part of our ongoing transition to organic practices we need to control weeds under the vines. In modern times weed spraying with a glyphosate weed killer has been popular. These weed killers neutralise in the soil and in theory only effect the plants that are sprayed but the picture is more complicated than that. The soils become hard and impervious over time and micro organisms find it hard to thrive under these conditions. We started transitioning to using an undervine weeder at Domain Road and the first part of that is turning the soil over to mound up under the vines. Check it out on this youtube link.

We don't know how lucky we are - 6 Jul 15

We recently visited our son Steven who is working on a Mosel vineyard this year. We may have mountains in Central Otago but by and large our vineyards are flat to gently sloping. At least they can be worked with standard machinery. Everything appears to be a challenge on the steeper vineyards (there are some on flatter ground). These 2 photographs are taken from a vineyard Steven worked on when he first arrived in January. Many of the wine companies have several small vineyards spread over many kilometres. 

Steven and Gillian - Kinheim