Soils ain't soils, Sol.

This being the beginning of another growing season here at Bloodwood, I thought it time to get really filthy for a change; thought it time to get our hands well and truly soiled.

When you are selecting the site for your new vineyard, there's a lot to be said for dirt. Not only is it a fairly handy medium in which to stand trellis posts but it can also play a critical role in the quality of your fruit.

You see, vines will grow almost anywhere as "those opposite" continually point out to me during cellar door tastings. This business about one area being able to produce wine while that one won't, is just another red herring. Wine grapes are grown and wine is produced in Alice Springs using similar technology to that found in Hobart or Mudgee.

You'll find the winemakers of Griffith just as unimpressed with vintage rains as we are at Bloodwood.  There's not a lot anybody can do about bush fires or hail, while floods and droughts are facts of this agricultural life. And yet vineyards pop up all over the place, sometimes in the most unlikely places.

Not all of them succeed, not all of them last for generations, but very few of them fail to make wine of some description or another sooner or later.

The wonderful thing about wines is that no two are identical.  Neighbouring wineries can try to level the playing field by growing the same variety on the same trellis, pruned to the same number of buds. They can tend the vines identically and pick their perfectly ripe fruit on the same day; vintage techniques can be identical. And yet, they will make two different wines. These differences may be quite subtle, but they will be there nevertheless. And difference can be all in a wine these days. Just ask the good bergs of Burgundy or Bordeaux if you don't believe me.                   

The French have been long convinced that soil (and aspect and micro-climate and overall provenance) has a lot to do with these differences. While science tells us that climate is more important in the macro scheme of things, soil, in theirs and my opinion, is an underrated link in the quality chain of every fine wine.

Our vineyard is planted on medium to low fertility gravelly soils over a friable, red clay base, the whole profile interspersed with limestone lenses shale and ancient volcanoclastics. Some of our more unkind colleagues refer to Bloodwood as 'the quarry', and as we had to turn to power gel and short fuses to secure our end posts in the Riesling vineyard..they have a point.

Why gravel? To make quality wines, you need quality grapes. And the critical parameter in such a cool, marginal climate as ours is appropriate ripeness of the fruit. Unlike almost any other Australian wine growing area,  acid and pH look after themselves in Orange. However, to make a high quality wine, grapes must ripen enough for flavour to complete the delicate balance in the finished wine.

A deep, high-fertility soil like some of the local, richer red mountain earth orcharding soils allows the mature vine to grow with so much vigour that, through shading and delayed ripening, optimum flavour may  not always be achieved even though alcohol levels can be relatively high.

Conversely, those soils which limit vigour, and, in traditional viticultural wisdom, make the vines work for their living, produce wines of more intense flavour,aroma and overall elegance.

In quality viticulture then, under this Bloodwood sun, all soils ain't soils!

Canopy Splitting (or) Pigs In Space

     Forget all you've learnt from Ensminger's Swine science: History and development of the swine industry; World and U.S. swine and pork - past, present, and future; and read on.
    
Once upon a time there was a swine with strange habits. You see, he really didn't want to be a pig, so all the long day he would peer through the dirty claustrophobic bars of his particular sty, and dream of being a classical ballet dancer, with classical non-cloven hooves and an ever so delicate elegance of gait. And, what's more, he'd practice. Every evening after the last late bucket of swill was splashed into his grubby little trough, he'd surreptitiously tip-toe about his peculiarly smelly sty, perched on his hind trotters imagining, for all the world, that the dung passage sliming dimly in the yellow, incandescent light along the front of his grungy little sty, was a bank of spot lights, and the slats of his ugly, dangerous floor, the firm, strong, clean, safe stage of Madison Square Garden itself.

     However, on Monday evening, he really did have an audience, not of a paying, more of a slaying kind! Vladimir Lemming, a Party man of scientific-non-empathetic background, noticed something of immense practical and ideological interest to the local backfatter industry. He noticed that Boris Porker, which was his, the pigs, stage name, balanced on his hind legs as he was, took up much less horizontal space vis a vis the pen floor, than any other recumbent porcine, which he most definitely was not!
    
And so, it happened that later that evening, Vlad composed a paper entitled The Ideological Importance of Vertical Displacement of Swine-in-Situ which he submitted for publication to the Australian Pork Talk News newsletter. The following Thursday, the 22nd of the month, two days after his actual observation, his practical paper on pig performance and perching possibilities was front page news in Porkda, the official Party magazine, which was to be read by everybody.

In essence, comrade Vlad proposed that a swine supervisor could, by arranging pigs vertically, halve accommodation costs. Or looked at it another way, he could double production per unit area of sty space. A revolution in pork was born! Vlad was commanded to investigate other areas of animal accommodation; such as the application of a similar approach in Party mental hospitals on prime residential land, and the  (by now) obvious advantages in these times of economic restraint, of having the inmates stand with their arms raised in all Party prisons. After all, this arrangement always works well at Party rallies.

Vineyard pruning is a Teutonic exercise at Bloodwood.  And from a reductionists viticultural point of view, Vlads divide and concur approach, applied to pruning, works well. Separation of the canopy of the vine in to an upstairs downstairs configuration allows the beneficial effect of light to enter into the potentially dark bud renewal zone near the cordon and enhances the ripening process through improved UV light exposure.

There are also great advantages for effective spray penetration in disease control. You don't need to saturate the entire canopy if you use, say, systemic bunch rot fungicides as one well directed spray can be applied efficiently to the exposed bunches.

The dormant vines may look a little strange at this time of year, and pruning involves much more care, but this is one revolution in pruning systems which works for us at Bloodwood in bringing home the bacon each vintage.