New Zealand adventure, day 6: a Felton Road deep dive
Website: https://feltonroad.com/
My second day in Central Otago was all about Felton Road. I’ve visited before, but this was an in depth look at the vineyards with owner Nigel Greening, viticulturist Gareth King, Nicola Greening who is daughter of Nigel and sells the wines, and winemaker Blair Walter. They have been farming biodynamically for a long time, but have gone beyond biodynamics to see if there’s more that can be done.
One of the challenges farming organically is how to deal with the stuff growing directly under the vines, in the vine row. Let’s use the term understory. And I don’t like to use the term ‘weeds’, because it’s really good having things other than vines growing in a vineyard. Here in Central it’s pretty arid, so irrigation is needed, and irrigation drippers are usually found under the vine, just where it’s hardest to mow or cultivate.
For this reason, Felton Road have been working on installing mid-row subsurface irrigation (Amisfield have been doing this, as well). The idea is that the vines still get watered, but the understory isn’t watered, and so with this they only need to do two cultivation passes a season, down from five. At MacMuir they have installed it every other row, so with 2 m row spacing a vine is only 1 m away from its nearest drink, but it will only be receiving water on one side. If it’s in every row, then there’s a potential for alternating the side that is watered, benefitting from partial root drying (the roots on the unwatered side signal using abscisic acid, telling the vine its experiencing water stress, but the vine still gets watered).
We looked at three of Felton Roads vineyards: MacMuir, Cornish Point and the Elms (which has the famous blocks in it). McMuir doesn’t look special: it’s on the flats. But the relatively clay-rich soils deliver beautiful Pinot Noir. Cornish Point is a beautiful vineyard, the first one Nigel Greening bought, and there’s a gold map showing that there’s very likely a rich seam of gold in an underground river running far below the middle of the vineyard.
One thing that they’ve been trialling is the use of drones for spraying. Particularly early in the season this is quite effective. It’s a good way of spraying when the vineyard might be highly susceptible to compaction if a tractor is used.
There’s also quite a bit of mulching going on. Rather than mow what grows in the rows, it’s possible to go through with a device called a roller crimper which then damages the stems of the plants and lays them flat on the ground, forming a mat that lowers soil temperatures, helps retain water, and which slowly decays, returning organic matter to the soil.
We had some really good discussions, and I came away with lots of ideas, inspired by the good work they are doing here. I recently reviewed the wines here, and now I’ve got some more notes to add, including a small vertical of the Block 2 Chardonnay. And the 2024s from barrel are looking very smart indeed.
