Manual works

Your servitor "sulfating" manually

Dear wine lovers,

Before our grapes turn from green to red, we still need to take care of them since they are still very vulnerable. At this time period and also because we want to work organically, we have to work manually.

Our Carignan grapes are very week towards Oidium. Using our tractor that pulls the sulfateuse would damage some vine shoots and would not permit to spray straight on the grapes. Since the surface we have is small, I decided to use the traditional manual sulfateuse last week which allowed me to be much more precise while spraying the grapes.

Due to all the rain we had, our baby vines have been completely surrounded with "weeds". Leaving them would damage our vines because those herbs would drink all the water in the soil. But since we don't use chemical weed killers and since our décavailloneuse can't recognize a baby vine and would kill them, we have to remove those herbs by hand. Look at my son Maxime on this video which, for some reason is upside down but this way it seems easer to do it, to see how we worked this out.

Doing this job, we found a lot of lady bugs which keep on giving us faith in our hard manual tasks.

Cheers,

Jean-Marc Espinasse - Domaine Rouge-Bleu