Drainage

Happy Easter,

Thank you for the big interest on our 2020 "The Vintage of the Century" wines tasting on Sunday April 23rd. As of today we still have a few tickets left which you can book on 2020 - " The Vintage of the Century " tasting

We will taste all of the 2020 wines Wiyana Wanda, Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, Arinna, Syrah, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and our traditional method sparkling wine. We promise you will be delighed with the wines and food.

Today I am going to write about the hidden heroe of a vineyard in Ontario, the tile drainage system. In Niagara, we receive about 700-800 mm of precipitation in a year in the form of rain and snow. This might be a little too much for a high quality vineyard and also with our heavy clay soils it creates the problem of water standing and compaction. To overcome this before planting any vines, we installed 4" diameter poly weeping tiles at a depth of 32". But unlike cash crop lands, we had to put them on every row so vines don't get we feet. On our 60 acres of vineyard we installed around 100 kilometers of drainage pipes with collectors etc.

Luckily we have a nice 17' slope on our land in the direction of rows which gave a natural flow of excess water through these pipes. Another good luck we had a municipal drain outlet at the very low end of our land that we can divert the water into. Not all the lands have this convenience. 

Until 2020 we did not care about irrigation in our vineyard. But with the uncertainty resulting from the climate change and newly planted 28 acres, we decided to install a drip irrigation system for the young vines. Irrigation in a vineyard has many haters and supporters. For example as far as I know in France irrigation is prohibited. But in Okanagan and California almost all if the vineyards have an irrigation system. I will not go into an argument but I believe, irrigation is a very useful tool in a vineyard manager's toolbox, and you don't have to use it unless necessary. In years like 2016, 2020 it would be a life saver for younger vines which had not developed a deep enough root system.

So we decided on a drip irrigiation system on our newly planted 28 acres and we came up with an interesting idea of using surface water in our irrigation. Generally local vineyards either use deep well water or town water from fire hydrants. Our idea was to collect the surface water (tile drain water is considered surface water) in a deep pond at the lowest area of our vineyard with an overflow outlet to the municipal drain. So I designed an irrigation system that collects water, fine filter it and pump through drip lines which costs us only a little electricity. According to my estimates we are collecting about 2-3% of the annual precipitation on our land and the rest is supplied to municipal outlet.

We can also use our drip irrigation system to feed the vines precisely with micro fertilizers through emitters. For this we installed a venturi sucking system to add liquid fertilizers. We have been watering our young vineyard for the last 3 summers and had great results. It is funny that Niagara might be the only winemaking region in the world to have both an irrigiation system and tile drainage system installed in a vineyard.

Stay well.
Adnan Icel
Owner&Winemaker