Sheep labour
BEPPI CROSARIOL
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
August 15, 2007 at 2:12 PM EDT
Harvest is still weeks away in Niagara, but vineyard workers are busy at a critical task. To keep the grape clusters free of mildew and exposed to the sun's ripening rays, the labourers must strip away all the vigorous leaves that grow downward and cast shade on the fruit.
It's tedious work, which is why many growers hire temporary-visa workers from bargain-labour countries such as Vietnam, Jamaica and Mexico.
Not at Featherstone Estate Winery in Vineland, Ont. The owners, David Johnson and wife Louise Engel, just brought in five farmhands from down the road. And by all accounts, the new recruits have been performing the assignment with unheard-of precision. "These guys miss nothing," said Mr. Johnson, who is also the wine maker.
Best of all, Mr. Johnson doesn't have to cut them a cheque or pay into a pension plan. All they want in return is to be left alone by the winery's scrappy little watchdog, a Jack Russell terrier named Bocci.
That's what you get when you hire sheep to do a farmhand's job. The woolly creatures, actually on loan from a nearby farmer, have been happily gnawing away at the vines for about three weeks. Ms. Engel says they even seem to prefer the fibrous leaves to their usual diet of grass.
As for the grapes and vital upper leaf canopy, the animals aren't interested. Credit their aversion to a combination of body size and evolution.
For one thing, sheep won't touch grapes in August because the berries are still green and sour. And, at just under 30 inches tall, the little lambs are only as high as the carefully trellised fruiting zone. That's crucial because unlike, say, goats, lambs have no upper incisors and are physically incapable of shearing off foliage with their heads above the horizontal position, preferring to graze by moving their bottom jaw forward in a head-down position.
"Their physiology makes them somewhat ideally suited to this, and they really like to eat. This is what sheep do best," Ms. Engel said.
The placid animals, four white and one black, were originally confined to a half-acre lot of riesling to see how they'd perform, but have since been given a wider feasting area.
"I was quite skeptical about it, but we didn't feel like we had a lot at risk," Mr. Johnson said. "It's not like they're beef cattle. You can grab them if you had to."
Mr. Johnson got the idea while on a two-month stint in New Zealand this spring to help with the grape crush at Sileni Estates winery. (Our northern spring is harvest time in the southern hemisphere, of course.)
"When I arrived, I commented to the local viticulturists as we were going through some blocks of fruit, 'Wow, you guys must have spent a fortune on leaf pulling down here,' because they were flawless - rows and rows and rows."
In New Zealand, where 45 million sheep outnumber the human population by more than 11 times, the cuddly quadrupeds are widely deployed as an economic win-win for both the grape growers and sheep farmers. "They can't afford to water their pastures, whereas the vineyards are all sitting there with tons of [vegetative] growth in them," Mr. Johnson said.
In fact, it's the vineyard owner who gets paid - typically $1 an animal for the entire season - to let them in for the leaf banquet. Oh, and there's one more bonus. "They're self-fertilizing," Ms. Engel said.
A devotee of sustainable farming, Ms. Engel is also a falconer and uses birds of prey to drive out starlings that feed on her grapes. "We're small, so we do wonky things here."
She says she hasn't sprayed insecticide on the property since she and Mr. Johnson took it over in 1999 after running a gourmet food shop in Guelph, Ont., for 17 years.
Featherstone, which makes eight wines, claims to be the first Niagara estate to use sheep for leaf thinning. Which explains the curious stares from neighbours and tourists.
"I'm waiting to see if they have an appetite for grapes," said Martin Malivoire, owner of nearby Malivoire Wine Co., a certified organic estate that makes a variety of critically acclaimed wines.
Mr. Malivoire, who has pondered bringing in chickens to his property to add to the ecological diversity of the vineyard and help fertilize the ground, applauds the effort. "I think it's great. I think it's exactly the direction we need to be going."
For a lean, boutique operation like Featherstone, which at 20 acres bills itself as Niagara's smallest full-time winery, the sheep are a blessing, saving several thousand dollars in annual labour costs.
For tourists, the odd spectacle (at least one city slicker has mistaken the lambs for dogs, Ms. Engel said) is a colourful lesson in the unique challenges of premium-grape farming.
Unlike hardy cash crops like soybeans and wheat, wine grapes demand constant tending, such as careful branch pruning. Let too many grape clusters form because of lax pruning and you may not have enough leaf matter to ripen the fruit. Prune too severely and the vine may put all its energy into the leaves.
In other words, there's often a good reason that a concentrated chardonnay from Beamsville in Niagara or a rich merlot from the Black Sage Bench in the B.C. Okanagan costs more than, say, a thin jug wine from California's factory-farmed central valley.
The vineyard buffet won't last forever. The lambs will have to be pulled just before véraison, the point at which grapes start to change colour and develop noticeable sweetness, likely the end of August. They also can't be redeployed next year because they'll have grown too high.
Like most farm animals, they will eventually be sold off and will end up on a dinner table, perhaps next to a glass of Niagara or pinot noir.
But the flock's contribution to the wine industry won't go unmarked. Mr. Johnson and Ms. Engel plan to launch a special bottling from the expertly trimmed Riesling block called Black Sheep Riesling 2007, to be released in 2008.
