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FEATURE Gearing up for vintage Vineyard equipment essentials
Vineyard Equipment
Gearing up for vintage
What are the vineyard equipment essentials?
Viticulturists and vineyard managers have multiple uses for many of the types of equipment found in the vineyard. For this special roundtable, Harrison Davies spoke to several operators to find out what their tools of choice are when working in the vines.
Xanadu viticulturist Rob Underdown Vine to Wine consultant Mike Hayes Vineyard manager Troy McInnes
Rob Underdown
The viticulturist at Xanadu Wines in Margaret River, Underdown has a focus on quality of work and using sustainable practices. As all great wine starts in the vineyard, Underdown’s vision reflects Xanadu’s overarching ethos: crafting outstanding wines that embody all the region has to offer. He believes that sustainable and responsible viticultural methods will create better fruit and, in turn, better wine.
The viticulturists
Mike Hayes
A viticulture and winemaking consultant from Queensland’s Granite Belt, Hayes has a history in wine stretching back to 1979. Alongside his consulting firm, Vine to Wine, Hayes has a passion for working within the industry to help growers develop best practice techniques in their vineyard in order to produce the best fruit their region can offer.
Troy McInnes
Based in Heathcote, Victoria, McInnes is the vineyard manager for varietal pioneers Chalmers. In his role he has opportunities to work the vineyards and has experience with a selection of alternative varieties like Nero d’Avola and Vermentino.
Rob Underdown
What type of vineyard equipment do you use?
Underdown: We use several brands of equipment in our vineyards. For tractors, we always use Kubota and for fungicide sprayers we always use FMR and Greentech; our harvester is a Nairne to tow behind and we use a Pellenc for trimming the rows. We use Eagle nets and then a variety of other brands for our ancillary equipment Hayes: I worked in many vineyards as a consultant in Queensland and I currently consult for about eight vineyards. The majority of the vineyards have our local tractor which is a Kubota tractor, which seems to be one of the big tractors up here on the Granite Belt. We use mowers as well for mowing the inter-rows and spray carts when we’re spraying the canopy. McInnes: We’ve got different cultivation gear, or chisel, ploughs and power arrows and rotary hose feeders for seeding, grasses and clover in the midrows. We’ve also got an spray over-row spray unit for fungal diseases and control.
How important is equipment in your vineyard? Underdown: Equipment is super important to the maintenance and upkeep of our vineyards at Xanadu. Without it, our vineyard is unsustainable. We have a regular maintenance schedule for all equipment and make sure it’s in good shape for the season. The choice of equipment is also equally important. We need to make sure we have the right equipment to do the right job. Hayes: what we focus on in the vineyard is a lot of manpower. We hand prune, we actually hand lift the wires, we hand shoot-thin, we hand leaf pluck and we hand bunch the grapes. Of course, we manually harvest to provide manpower. McInnes: Couldn’t work without our equipment basically. It’s just too hard to rely on contractors to do all these jobs, so to have your own equipment is definitely far better.
When investing in new equipment, what do you look for? Underdown: We always look for equipment that will meet our needs in the vineyard and capability to complete the tasks we need done is a priority. Value for money is, as one would expect, also important. Having equipment that is of high-quality and efficiency. We always ask ourselves; can it be flexible to match our multiple row widths? Hayes: Some people with larger vineyards need to have some mechanical help. So therefore, what we look at is automatic shoot thinning, and what we’re looking at there is the de-stemming of the trunks; so all the suckers and shoots on the trunks. I’ve also got brushers now which can go along at the front of your tractor, and can do two rows in one hit just by driving down there and brush all the shoots off, which saves an enormous amount of manpower. The other thing that you can look at is a leaf plucker. They ensure that we go along and pluck the leaves away from the fruiting zone. However, they don’t do as good a job or aren’t as efficient, in my opinion, as good old manual labour.
McInnes: Something that’s been used and proven. The quality with sprayers, how good is the coverage for disease control because coverage is key, and also durability of those machines.
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What are some of your favourite things to use in the vineyard? Underdown: My favourite thing to have in the vineyard is definitely the harvester. It’s fun to use and really helps to speed up the process when we are harvesting during vintage. Hayes: Boots on the ground. Like I always say, the best fertiliser you can put on your vineyard is your own footsteps. So if you’re out there looking in your vineyard, you can see what parts aren’t healthy and what are healthy and so on.
McInnes: Probably the harvester itself with the new select process sorting on the machines themselves. So they take out all the MOG on the material other than grapes. So you’re left with a premium quality sample. Underdown: I don’t believe its super important to have the most technologically advanced equipment in the vineyard. Having good equipment that provides quality of the job and efficiency are things that I look at more when I consider equipment. Hayes: Technology has advanced immeasurably at the present time, such as tractors to reduce the compacting of soil around the root; there are many different models out now which reduce that soil compaction and the root
compaction of the vines as you’re driving down the row. But it’s really a blend of a lot of people going back to what they call the silly plough now, which is an undervine weeding machine. It’s mid mounted in between the small wheel and the big wheel on the tractor, or between the two wheel bases of the tractor and it goes in and out hyperbolically and pulls the weeds out from underneath the row, and then just misses the grapevine and goes in again. A lot of our practices are coming back but there’s a lot of new technology, which is absolutely amazing. Some of the tractors they’re building now are small and compact but very powerful so it’s really a combination of both. McInnes: I don’t need to have the biggest and best that’s on the market, just something that’s reliable and does a good job. We have a rotary hoe that’s 40 years old and it still works the soil. We’ve got a grape harvester, it’s only probably 10 years old now with a slight dip process whereas the older machines never had that. So something older may or may not be as good in that scenario, but some of the older equipment is sufficient to do what you need to get done.
Troy McInnes
Is it more important to have the most technologically advanced equipment or are there standard classics that you rely on? How can different type of equipment influence work in the vineyard? Underdown: We have different row widths at the Xanadu vineyards, so we need equipment that can be used in all situations. Unfortunately, this is not possible, so some rows have to be driven twice.
Hayes: The size of the vineyard has a lot to count once you’re getting up to 200-300 acres, or even 100 acres, you’ve really got to hone in on mechanisation to save labour costs and particularly now as it’s hard to find labour. So while you’re looking to the future, and you’re looking at mechanisation or auto farming, the main reason behind that is because we haven’t got the workers. McInnes: Just time efficiency. Things like that make things quicker and easier to be able to do a job on time.
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