Hand picking grenache, vintage 2007
Viticultural Practises
Minimal impact viticulture.
d’Arenberg employs both hand and machine pruning in the vineyard to control vigour and crop levels. Pruning is carried out in the winter months, and involves cutting off the dominant shoots from the vine. Summer trimming helps keep the grapes exposed to the light to increase grape quality.
d’Arenberg employs a minimal spray program to protect against major crop losses, and the vineyards are constantly monitored for pests and disease.
We plant legume cover crops in the vineyards annually, generally in alternate rows, as well as clover and grasses, which are planted in some blocks and mown periodically. These processes usually begin with the opening rains in April or May.
The purposes of these various processes are threefold: to add nitrogen to the soil and also to serve as a natural and organic way to help prevent the growth of any weeds. Cover crops also act as a natural mulch, which helps to add organic material to the soil, promote worm and microbe activity and in the summer helping moisture retention.
Irrigation and Stress
Some of d’Arenberg’s vineyards receive a limited degree of supplementary irrigation during the growing period, but the emphasis on grape growing here is to stress the vines so that they work hard and produce the kind of intensely flavoured and small- berried grapes that we require.
This type of vineyard regime means that crops are limited – in some of our older vineyard blocks, sometimes as little as a quarter or half a tonne to the acre is produced. In this case less is definitely more, as the quality of fruit off these low-yielding old vines is tremendous.
Many of d’Arenberg’s vineyards are dry grown, that is they do not receive any supplementary irrigation at all. The resultant grapes are incredibly small and have very intense flavour and colour. The smaller the grapes, the greater the skin to pulp ratio, which has a huge positive impact on the quality of wine made. Much of d’Arenberg’s Grenache is grown in this way.