The wine-farm community 17 November 2006

A dreadful accident prompts Chris Williams to some sombre thoughts

In previous columns, I have tended to write about the things which make being in the wine industry appealing: the delicious wines, beautiful scenery, unusual and amusing characters and the inevitable cycle of nature. But there are also more sombre issues that need turning to sometimes.

Often forgotten are the scores of workers who tirelessly labour in the country’s vineyards for very modest reward. At Meerlust we have staff who all live on the estate in provided housing, some families for generations. (In the pics, Abraham Snel, left, and Abie Swartz) This is changing now, with the youngsters able to study further and broaden their prospects. While we tend to lose our most promising people in this manner, we encourage this and support it with a social development and health foundation.

The result will be that we eventually lose our farm ‘community’, but I suppose this was the consequence of paternalism in the past and we must promote the development of these families. It is always a battle to keep the teenagers in school, as the parents put pressure on them to get work and thereby contribute to household income. One of the (unintended?) consequences of the Land Tenure Act has been that many farms are now ‘downsizing’ their permanent staff and making use of contractors or relying more on seasonal labour. At the moment Meerlust only employs people who reside on the farm, some on a casual basis (this is of their own choice), but the plight of contract labour was brought home to us forcefully very recently when a truck transporting a contracting team to our neighbour’s farm was struck by a train at the Faure crossing, tragically killing 19 people.

Of course all the authorities immediately started various commissions of enquiry and probes into transport etc, but while the transporting of people on open vehicles (trucks, bakkies, tractor-trailors) is illegal, the Department of Transport has admitted that they don’t have the resources (or will?) to prevent it. The practice also abounds in the building industry. Because of the overloading of these vehicles, when the inevitable accident occurs, the death toll is very high, far exceeding the carrying capacity of these vehicles. Of course this might not have been prevented if the people were travelling in a bus, but the practice is still illegal.

There are initiatives to improve the lives and prospects of rural people, and apart from the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, the Occupational Health and Safety Act, we also have WIETA, the Wine Industry Ethical Trade Association, a voluntary body which monitors and audits its members. Fairtrade is a UK based global initiative begun for the coffee producers of South America and Africa but spreading to other sectors as well. However, I believe it will only be a sincere partnership between organized agriculture and labour that will really impact the lives of these people in the long term, and to be able to do it properly, we need to continue to grow our sales both in terms of volume and value. The stakes are high. It is not just profits and capital expenditure that will benefit from wine sales, but the very lives of the people who are an integral part of producing that full bodied red or tangy sauvignon blanc that we all enjoy.

Meanwhile, there's tipping and topping to do....

November is a strange time of year on a wine farm in that all the bottling is finished, the young wines safely blended and returned to barrel and it is still a little too early to start worrying about next season – after all, there is a much needed holiday on the horizon.

What does occupy a lot of our energy at Meerlust at the moment is viticulture. The vines have all budded out nice and evenly, flowering and berry-set has occurred and all the little bunches now look like little clusters of petite pois, while the still-green shoots grow ever-upward, unfurling new leaves and tendrils as they go.

With the unseasonal rains we experienced in late October, vine health is a priority at this time. We have to stick to a fortnightly programme of preventative sprays to avoid getting downy and powdery mildew, which at this stage won’t affect the bunches but will cause necrotic patches on the leaves, diminishing their photosynthetic potential. We also perform the suckering, which is removing the infertile or poorly-spaced ‘water shoots’ which will sap the vine’s energy and lead to a dense, overgrown and poorly illuminated and aerated canopy, ideal to breed fungal disease and prevent the grapes from colouring. We also have to ‘tip’ and ‘top’ the growing points of the shoots so that the vine begins to put its energy into ripening fruit rather than vegetative growth. The collective term for these activities is canopy management.