Landsman has started pruning – and disagreeing with a Frenchman over close planting 1 July 2005

Chris Mullineux's picture of ‘green and fresh’ in the vineyards this time of year is spot-on. The cover crop is brilliant green against the brown of the canes, and the morning air is crisp. Best time of the year to see where you made mistakes in the canopy of your vineyards – no leaves to hide bad suckering (when excess shoots are removed) or bad shoot positioning practices (when the shoots are positioned in a certain way to get a certain effect).

We started pruning yesterday. Two students, one from Elsenburg (woman, pretty) and one from University of Stellenbosch (man, tall), arrived and were put on the trailer behind the tractor and made part of the team. The woman knows how to prune, the man from university in his final year not a clue: they never were taught how to prune!  Strange. Maybe he bunked those days.

We have pulled out 50 hectares of vineyards this year, mainly to rid the farm of vines affected with leafroll virus. Now we have to plan the replanting of it. This farm is steep with many different slopes and valleys – a beautiful place.

I and the French influence (consultant) agree on everything except .... how densely to plant the vines. I know we are all a little fed up with foreign advice, but fortunately I have an open mind and he is a great individual. We tasted the first wine he made in our cellar and it is, after all my concerns, a lovely wine (so far).

We agreed on all viticultural matters (which cultivar on  which slope, soil type, trellis system, row direction, etc), but not plant density. Some of the French like to plant their vines very close to each other (8000 to 14 000 vines per ha), while South African research proved this to be not a good idea (we average 3000). The French argument is that the more vines you plant per hectare, the bigger the competition for space, nutrients and water between the vines, which means less vigour and fewer grapes per vine, leading to better quality. Our guys say it does not work like that here. Our soils are too rich and often too deep: planting closer just means the vines will get denser and grow higher and give terribly thin, green and pink wines! Apart from the fact that our equipment – like tractors, etc - is just not built to fit into a row only wide enough for a fat man to walk in.

In Italy and France I have seen caterpillar vehicles spraying these narrow plantings, or tall tractors looking like spiders spraying five rows at a time –driving astride the vines with wheels on each side of the row. They also sometimes plant straight down the steepest slope and every three to four years spend a fortune carting the eroded soil back to the top of the hill!

It is so comforting to just do things because you know it works (in this case, planting the South African way). It is so dicey to do things because it might give you better quality and a Frenchman tells you it works all over the world. And am I a sucker for the ‘quality’ argument!