ZABIBU

I mentioned thatwe had bad mildew problems in 2004 (see WINE above) and that we lost the entire crop. Well it really was bad. Look at the state the fruit was in that year in the picture below.

The fruit was badly affected in 2004. There was no fruit to make any wine with. Lesson learnt. It won’t happen again!

We were using all the wrong treatments, we had terrible canopy mangement so we could not get the wind through the vines and the moisture was sitting around creating humidity in the hot sunshine during the day and so the result was that the mildew really had a good time of it.

The downy mildew seems to appear with a combination of rain and sunshine. After we have a rain or misty mornings, followed by hot sunshine we will generally get an outbreak. The first signs of yellow oil mark spotting is the sign that Downy Mildew is there and that  urgent attention is needed.

The yellow oilmark spotting on the top side of the leaves- Downy Mildew

The brown/burnt looking patches on the underside of the same leaf- Downy Mildew

We have had a bit of Downy appear last week as we had some heavy rain and this seemed to set it off. We were able to control however with a chemical called Coptrace or Liquicop (a soluble copper formulation) which can be used to treat downy mildew later in the season. This is an environmentally friendly product and leaves no harmful residues. In addition we use Sporekill, which is a broad spectrum fungicide and bactericide and seems to work in the control of Downy Mildew.

In 2004 we cut the vines back as much as possible and then burnt as much of the foliage as we could to try to get rid of as many of the fungal spores. We were then able to use a good spray routing to keep it in check and subsequently have made good progress with the crop size and quality in the following years.