COMMENTS

From Peter de Wet of Excelsior:
I worked in Australia and Napa (California), and they definitely use creosote poles. Nobody seems to complain about rubbery wines from there. The aroma does crop up in Rhone wines, but they use a lot of bush vines. So I can't see creosote being a problem.

From Jean Vincent Ridon of Signal Hill (Cape Town) and Le Signal D'agly (Roussillon):
In France we use mostly split acacia poles for the vines – bear in mind that for most of France we have a higher density of planting, so we need lower vines, and acacia is ok. As well the fruit zone is lower, which is worse for our French backs, but does allow the use of tractors to straddle the vines, rather than go inbetween.

Keeping in mind that vineyards in France are planted to last much longer, so that pine poles, even treated, would not be suitable. My Roussillon vineyards are up to 80 years old, and the poles were changed when they were 50... something that pine poles would not allow. So more vineyards are now planted with metal galvanised poles, which also allowing us to easily hook up the middle wires during the season.

After calling my pole supplier in the Roussillon, he told me that pine poles started to be introduced after the war (1945), but the ‘tar’ used to treat them was considered dangerous, so not used.... We know that in France it is forbidden to tar roads in the vineyard after veraison, as the grape can get the flavour of the hot tar....

I do not think that the wetness of the winter in France can be the reason to use an alternative to pine, as in the Cape many of our vineyards are on clay base soils (10-25%) so the residual humidity at the foot of the pole is as bad as in flat French ground. In the Roussillon we have a schistic soil so residual humidity is low for the feet of the poles, and I have acacia poles which are very old.

From Dana Buys of Vrede en Lus:
If creosote poles were the cause of the problem for the red wines, then why are our Cape white wines doing very well with no complaints re the same off-odours? The white grape are planted using the same systems & poles by and large.

It is unlikely to be a clone problem if we have the same complaint re Cab, Shiraz and Merlot reds. The rootstocks are pretty standard here and across Aussie & USA so that is not a highly likely source of the problem either. It may be useful to genetically test the rootstocks against the same from other countries to see if some mutant has not crept into the system over time. We have identified a block of Cab Sauv on our farm that consistently produces a band-aid type of aroma in its wines. The block is higher up, on decomposed granite soils, well drained, planted north-south, always looks like it is in great balance, yet produces a wine that we cannot use. We have not been able to figure out the causes of the problem. I will ask Susan [Susan Wessels, the winemaker] to take some of the wine from that block to the team dealing with the research.

Note from Tim James:
I gather that the researchers are compiling an extraordinarily thorough listing of all viticultural and viniicultural practices involved in the wines they are examining, and will no doubt discover any common patterns (hopefully there'll be something fairly straightforward to discover). Incidentally, while it is true that most complaints have been about red wines, there do seem to be a few instances where the 'burnt rubber' has been found by some reputable tasters on white wines.

From Charl du Plessis:
This is a very interesting observation, and surely worth disproving rather than simply dismissing (Smit and Buys). I 'planted' many hundreds of these poles in vineyards, and ask anyone that has 'uprooted' the old ones:tThe creosote is gone, it has to go somehwere! To simply dismiss this is to miss a possible opportunity: Maybe SA 'terroir' is different to Napa's etc. when it comes to creosote, maybe it is vineyard practice (trellising, type of irrigation ... shallow roots vs deeper roots), who knows. What will probably be found is that it is a combination of factors that causes the problem, not one single factor.

From Peter May:
I was at a commercial English vineyard this weekend in which metal angle posts for trellising are extensively used and I was able to get a good look at them. Seems to me they offer many benefits - they have slots either side which hold the wires, and the wires can easily be raised and lowered to suit tthe growing phase of the vines. With wood posts you need to fasten the wires by nailing staples around them, or using fixings, once the wood posts have been fixed in the ground. In countries where manual labour is scarce and expensive (like the UK), seems like a no-brainer