Vineyards offering tours of woolly workers
They were the first to baaa-ring the idea to North America.
Dave Johnson and Lousie Engel, owners of Featherstone Estate Winery in Vineland have brought back a herd of young sheep, lambs, to help with some work around the vineyard.
The lambs are the perfect height and have the ideal diet to clear the bottom portion of the vines of leaves, leaving the grapes completely untouched. The vineyard is divided up into five sections which the lambs are allowed to graze one at a time.
“We need to get sun strike, we need to get air flow, it makes for better grapes which makes for better wine making. It makes the clusters cleaner for harvest,” said Johnson.
Johnson first saw the method for leaf removal while working in New Zealand on season in 2007.
“I was staying right in the vineyard and the place was perfectly leaf-pulled, it was just flawless,” said Johnson. “I asked him, ‘You must spend a fortune’ and he said, ‘actually we don’t, we have lots of sheep in New Zealand.”
The type of sheep used to graze vineyards is important because sheep are like dogs in that each breed has varying energy levels.
“These are quite calm and stable. We really need an animal that is quite calm. We don’t want them running away, they’ll go over the fence. Some breeds would clear that fence like deer, it wouldn’t even slow them down, these are really great that way as a personality,” explains Johnson.
New sheep are used every year as well because once the lambs mature they grow too tall for Johnson’s purposes. Only the bottom section of leaves need to be removed and the top ones left to collect the sunlight to feed the plant and grapes.
The sheep used in the vineyards go to market after a year.
“We started with five lambs because we were concerned they would eat the grapes,” said Johnson.
“We didn’t know why they wouldn’t and we still really don’t know. We had some guys from Guelph University by and they said, ‘well, sheep as is with most animals, don’t eat round things because they could be poisonous.”
The lambs are allowed to graze one hectare sections for a week. A student is employed to move the electric fencing to the next quadrant and the lambs are released in the new section to do their job.
“We get 25 every year and they can strip a hectare in five days of leaves so we just keep moving them, bouncing them across the vineyard all summer. We move the electric fence.”
Initially, Johnson was hoping they didn’t need to divide the vineyard up but the lambs grazed too unevenly to be useful.
“What we hoped to do was give them the whole farm, but they won’t feed evenly. If you give them the whole farm, they’ll feed here and then they’ll go and siesta over there and never eat there, oddly, so we keep them in one hectare blocks, 25 sheep in there and they really strip it evenly top to bottom, side to side,” said Johnson.
A handful of other wineries in the area employ the same technique, including Southbrook Vineyard and Tawse Winery. Southbrook even has their own breeding stock.
The sheep are released into the vineyard only at certain times during the year and this year Featherstone Winery has been offering tours so people can see the lambs in action. The first tours sold out so another tour for Aug. 24 at 3:30p.m. has been added. For more information or to book a spot, call ahead at (905) 562-1949.