With the 2019 harvest almost upon us and being struck down with tick-bite fever for the fourth year in a row, I have some time to reflect on 2018 and wonder what 2019 will bring. 2018 was a [...]
I haven’t posted in ages! I will try to get back to regular posting again! Our 2018/2019 season is already half way. Chardonnay and Shiraz vineyards are very uneven – mostly due to [...]
2018 is already half way. We had a challenging harvest with the extreme drought, but since April we saw normal rainfall patterns return – a good sign that we will have a good winter. I [...]
In October last year I wrote a piece on this little vineyard that is getting a second chance. The post was called Vineyard Revival – The Beginning. With a lot of TLC from farmer André du [...]
Yesterday we scanned a 4.5 hectare piece of land at Overgaauw Wine Estate in Stellenbosch with an electromagnetic soil scanner. The scanner is owned by a dynamic new company called Revolute [...]
Early last year I was confronted with an unusual request from one of my clients. While discussing a NDVI image, I realized that we were not on the same page… Turns out he is red-green [...]
I wrote a blog post in March last year about Echalas vineyards in South Africa. More and more of this stunning trellis system is popping up all across South Africa. One of the most amazing [...]
I’ve had a lot of people ask me to do an updated video of the Ghost Vines of Theewaterskloof. So I headed there early Friday morning. This time I didn’t struggle through the sludge, [...]
The ongoing drought in the Western Cape is not only crippling the agricultural sector, but also having a major socioeconomic impact on South African, Zimbabwean and Malawian citizens. With [...]
2017 is almost at its end. This has been a tough year in the vineyards. Very low winter rainfall saw the groundwater at just about 70% in some regions at the start of the growing season. This put [...]
It was around 14:00 on Monday the 25th of September that I received a phone call from farmer and wine enthusiast André du Toit, the same guy that enjoys and embraces my energetic (and mostly [...]
Most vineyards are growing at a blinding pace by now. Varietals like Sauvignon blanc are slow starters – but watch out, they catch up VERY fast in the mid-term. With the dry season that we are [...]
Reading the story of the “Last Rites for Lodi’s old vine growths” I might as well have read a mirror article called something like “South African Old Vines Under Threat”. The situation in [...]
Well it’s been almost a month since I last posted. I’ve been very busy out in the vineyards, and also too lazy to write. Today it’s cold and rainy outside, so I thought [...]
What an amazing week it has been in the vineyards of the Cape Winelands. Pruning is in full swing and a few producers have picked up on the internal pruning contests that Felco sponsor and [...]
I was fortunate to be invited by Felco Africa to judge the pruning contests on three farms from Friday to today. The contests were hosted by Distell and sponsored by Felco. The purpose of the [...]
Last week we went up to the Skurfberg again. It was my second time there. The first was in October 2016 – during the growing season. The landscape is a different one now. Cold, crisp and [...]
