Cultivation of the Soil, Part Two

We also cultivate the soil between the individual vines. With the Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, as well as the Cabernet, we use a swivel-mounted arm which crumbles the soil

and chops up the vegetation. One certain disadvantage of this is the speed— .8 - 1.3 kilometres per hour. The advantage, compared with more aggressive and incisive systems, is that it forms no furrows, which

could lead to earth washing away during the next heavy rainfall.

Weingut Kollwentz

Burgenland

www.kollwentz.at

Cultivation of the Soil-Part 1, the Disc Harrow.

Now that the vines are finished with flowering—under ideal weather conditions, btw—we turn our attention to matters concerning the soil and its cultivation. Recent rainfall deposited some 120 litres of water per square metre onto our vineyards, which the ground happily accepted. And since we've had such heat in the past couple days, the topsoil is in perfect condition for cultivation. In our Pannonian climate, we have to reckon nowadays with increasing dryness, and for this reason we only did a cursory job of working over every other row. For this, depending upon the condition of the ground, we use  a cultivator—or as you see in the pictures, a disc harrow. Because of the contrary disposition of the discs and the oblique angle of their relation to one another, the soil is only lightly broken up, and the vegetation slightly chopped and lightly worked into the soil. This breaks up the capillary layers in the ground, hence reduces the amount of water lost to evaporation.

 

Weingut Kollwentz

Burgenland

www.kollwentz.at