May 2000

May 2000
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Dam Expensive

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Well, the bills came through for the dam and the drainage. Thank goodness the second dam improvement will have to be delayed. We can say that this is our first real shock. The whole spend is now 30% over budget and we have trimmed our expectations for this year's work even to achieve this! We hasten to say this is not because of incompetence on anyone's part, just topography. The photos show nothing of how steep the land is or how big this dam is. We chose this farm because we wanted the best terroir for our vines but steep hillsides are not the place to store water. If you build a wall on a gently sloping piece of land you can hold a lot of water behind it, therefore the cost per cubic metre of water is low. If you build a wall on a steep hillside you need a big wall and you get a puddle!

Because you need a massive wall the cost per cubic metre of water stored is much more. I think we will work out the mathematical relationship between cost and steepness and call it Tulbagh's first law of Sloperand. It is probably a logarithmic relationship as in theory you could store an infinite amount of water behind a small wall on a perfectly horizontal surface and none if your surface is vertical! We'll publish it and make a fortune!

Water is a scarce resource. The South African government is being remarkably astute and is ensuring that farmers register their dams with the government to show how they are using their water. This is not just a case of Big Brother at work. The slogan is something like "Water for all...forever". It is to prevent farmers from catching the run off from the water catchments in dams, thus preventing it from reaching the densely populated areas, unless they are using it for economically justifiable purposes. The idea is admirable but an absolutely huge task open to administrative delays and abuse. We have registered all our dams and support the process. We do hope, though, that the administrators have the resources to run the idea through to its conclusion as delays in permission for new dams could be disastrous to start ups like ours in the future.

As you can see from the pictures the dam is there. Where, you may ask, is the water? We told Manie to get on to the powers that be, but he is obviously not in touch. If anyone knows a good rain dance man then send details to the Contact Us section of tulbagh.com....urgently!

We have had our first proposal from Cape Organics on composting and mulching of our first 4 hectares. In all this we want to achieve a balance between soil nutrition and the influence of our chosen terroir. We spent a long time selecting our site, looking at all the factors mentioned in "Why and Where". The soil was one of the most important factors and was tested and mapped out with great precision. We don't want to fertilize the ground - just condition it so that the micro organisms and worms would return to do their job in the natural way. Our vineyard will be a tough school, a boot camp for vines where they have to earn their living by digging deep - no cozy vegetable patch this!

We want our vines to put down a deep and extensive network of roots in order to absorb their character from the soil chosen for them. On these steep slopes the water run off is high and the soils are less weathered with abundant fragments of parent rock material in the subsoil. The soil material between the rock fragments is also more silty than clayish. These soils belong to the Glenrosa soil form. They are low in clay and with their high rock content will stay loose and pliable after ripping. Where extensive clay occurs it causes an impermeable barrier to water drainage thus causing a "perched" water table above the subsoil. Vines hate to have their roots in water so soil forms with clay are to be avoided. Glenrosa is one of the best soils for growing vines.

Glenrosa soils were found to cover a vast part of the farm. These Glenrosas are further divided in 6 variations. Gs1, 2 and 3 are rockier in the subsoil and contain less than 20% volume soil material in the fractured plates; Gs4, 5 and 6 have a higher degree of soil development.

The former group retain water less and are suitable for vigorous growing and early wine grape cultivars. The second for later cultivars.

Having bought the farm for its great soils we didn't want to spoil them with a program of mulching and composting that would alter their character. We also need to keep down weeds so our irrigation system was chosen carefully. We have chosen the organic route to wine nirvana so spraying once every couple of months between the rows with Round-Up (a weed-killer) is not the solution for the weed problem.

After much discussion dripper irrigation was chosen. The drippers will only irrigate in the immediate area of the vine itself. With no summer rainfall few weeds will grow where there is no water so the areas between the rows will be relatively easy to keep weed free. In the winter when it does rain the areas between the rows can be used to grow a nitrogen fixing cover crop such as clover to refresh the soil.

The vine rows themselves can be kept weed free by bedding them with a straw mulch about 75cm wide.

In the end we want to make our vineyard less attractive to pests, disease and weeds so that we won't have to worry so much about how to get rid of them.

The compost chosen will be one that has been thoroughly broken down - more of a soil than a compost. This will only release nutrients very slowly and will need application only once every 4 to 5 years. It's specially developed for organic wine grape vine use and is not used to cultivate table grapes which require a different regime.

As we said before we didn't buy a vineyard for its beautiful house, which is just as well as, unfortunately, the house on the vineyard is extremely ugly. The architect called in to do an emergency face lift called it Villa Veriugli and produced lots of drawings of expensive solutions. As we also said the vineyard comes first so maybe down the line when all is built we'll have a beautiful house to match the beautiful vineyard. Or will the cellar then be the number one priority?

We also want a swimming pool. Our neighbour Henning Klopper and his wife have a lovely Bed and Breakfast establishment with a pool, plenty of facilities, and entertainingly enough a large, semi submersible bulldog. The pool is freezing cold so when you jump in with your children you need to bounce around to stay warm.

All this splashing will really excite the bulldog, he will charge barking madly across the manicured lawns and skid to a halt at the edge of the pool slobbering and gyrating. Sometimes if it is slippery he won't stop and will fall in, thrashing wildly. The cold water closing over his head usually keeps him quiet and he looks like a small, white, enraged hippo as he bounces from the bottom back up to the surface for air. The first time this happens it can be quite frightening but once you get used to it it is pure entertainment. It doesn't matter how many times you heave him out, he always comes back for more.

I don't know what it is about the water that turns South Africans on, be they man or beast. Probably the heat. Another of our neighbours, Percy Fitzpatrick, has a nice pool and allowed us to use it one hot afternoon. He joined us later on with some professionals from the wine industry, so we sat in the gazebo to chat and have a beer. Mrs. G-W was catching a few rays by the side of the pool so I suppose it was only polite that Percy should ask her to avert her gaze as he stripped to the buff and dived in. Being a woman of no mean pluck she gave the display her full attention. A couple of laps later he strolled back into the pool side gazebo and grabbed a towel before giving us his opinion on the Richter99 rootstock. Nobody was particularly amazed by what they saw, not even Mrs. G-W.

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