Many people have been paying attention to eating healthy lately. Interest in organic and eco-friendly foods is growing. We also want to produce organic wine, but there is a long way to go.
It's not just planting and harvesting
In order for the wine from our vineyard to be of high quality, we need the vines to be in good health. This means that the grapes must be ripe and healthy. During their growth, they are often destroyed by mold and fungi or various weeds take away their nutrients. To prevent them from being destroyed, we must treat the vines, of course, only with permitted means and standardized procedures. This is the only way we can fight pests. However, the trick is that if we want to protect the vines with spraying, the shrub itself also gets affected, not just the pest.
What happens to the vine can be easily illustrated in humans. "They prescribe antibiotics to patients for the disease, which will help them. But the drug also has a negative effect, for example on the intestinal microflora, and it is recommended to supplement the treatment with probiotics. It works the same way with the vine. We give it a medicine that will help in the fight against diseases of the bushes, but the bush will take it somewhere else," says Ján Drobný, an experienced oenologist and chairman of the board of directors of the Bratislava - Vinohrady Wine Association.
The bush sometimes gets into bad shape and requires more frequent spraying to fight back. It is weakened and the constant exposure to various chemicals will sooner or later destroy it. Of course, this chemistry also gets into the soil, which is also reflected in the taste of the wine.
The journey to organic wine
That's why we started using less strenuous sprays based on a purely natural basis. We call them teas. They are actually extracts from horsetail, nettle or other plants. "For example, the vine can be affected by powdery mildew, which boron helps with. To fight it, we don't use artificial fungicides, but rather an extract from citrus fruits, because they have a lot of boron. Through the leaves, the vine takes in as much boron as it needs, and thus strengthens its immunity. When powdery mildew comes, the vine can fight it more effectively on its own," adds Ján Drobný.
In order to be able to say that we grow organic wine, the soil must undergo a certain purification. It must be freed from all kinds of artificial fertilizers and chemicals that the vines have been sprayed with for many years. Such a process can easily take up to 7 years. It may happen that after 5 years of soil cleaning, powdery mildew or other mold appears on the bush. If we were to spray it with fungicide again, we would lose those 5 years of effort and have to start over. Another full 7 years.
Organic wine is rightly more expensive, by about half, thanks to these steps. With organically cultivated vineyards, the yield of the crop decreases. People seek it out and are willing to pay for that quality. Growers even have several approaches to growing it. For example, the so-called biodynamic. In it, the winegrower follows nature itself and the phases of the moon. They believe that if a full moon can raise the ocean by 7 meters, then he can certainly work with plants. Or they work in the vineyard exclusively early in the morning, while the sun is still high and the air is naturally moving. They have completely abandoned machines and work the land with horses. That way, exhaust fumes do not reach the grapes.
There is also a vine – Demeter. It is a self-sufficient vineyard, which the growers take care of exclusively by hand. They break off protruding branches and mow the tall grass. In such a vineyard, sheep are most often grazed and are not even plowed. The vines grow bunches that are not crammed with berries, so any plague is blown away by the wind – unlike bunches that bear too many berries. There, the mold closes in and begins to eat the bunch from the inside.
We also want to start growing organic grapes next year. It will be a long journey, but we are already looking forward to drinking our unique organic wine with you.