My name's Keith Tulloch.
And I'm Alisdair Tulloch.
We're here at Keith Tulloch Wine in Pokolbin, in the Hunter Valley.
We’re about 25 minutes from Singleton here.
Pokolbin is very historic area that's been making wine since about 1823.
And our family moved here and started making wine in 1896.
We have a range of different wines that we create
some which are just grown on the property and made on site.
We grow quite a lot of semillon,
and we're increasing our plantings of chardonnay and shiraz.
We produce about 8000 cases of wine per year.
We focus on small batch production, from very select sites.
Growing up in a grape growing family, I was always, in and around
vineyards and winemaking, so from a very early age, I was out
working in the vines and helping in the little ways that I could.
Throughout my lifetime, the change in the climate's
been really noticeable and the way that grape vines react to climatic
rather than specific weather events is actually quite telling.
We're kind of going from the hottest, driest years
to the wettest years on record
consistently back to back on top of the long term trends
that the vines are reacting to in terms of the temperature accumulation.
The shift in when we're harvesting grapes,
the types of grapes we’re harvesting, the chemistry of the grapes
we’re harvesting has changed quite dramatically.
We're basically losing the winter and grape vines
are coming out of dormancy sooner and sooner,
which means that they're exposed to the risk of a late frost.
It's moving the harvest of the grape varieties closer together.
We’re used to picking most of the varieties through February and March,
and now we’re even peaking in January.
The biggest problem for us with viticulture
is how to adapt these vineyards to these changing conditions.
In terms of high rainfall events and wet seasons keeping downy mildew,
powdery mildew, botrytis, all of these potential blights out of the vineyard.
And in heatwave events, the irrigation
of the vines, the application of sunscreen are really important tools that we use
to try and make sure that vines don't enter heat stress.
This vineyard was established in 1968 and it was unirrigated up until 2018.
When we came through heatwaves in 2017, 18 and 19,
the effect on the vines was so severe that we came to the conclusion
that we could no longer continue to grow grapes the way that we had.
And we've recently invested in the irrigation
because the importance of managing those heat waves.
All of the irrigation is drip irrigation, essentially just placing the water on the vines themselves.
So that is a really good way of efficiently managing our water.
We are very mindful that the older mindset,
which has classically been about cultivation exclusively
and a bare earth policy with the use of herbicides
to keep the ground storey under the vine as clean as possible, isn't necessarily
going to be the ideal target into the future.
Traditionally, mid row management would be physically remove the weeds
through heavy cultivation in the middle rows,
which did lead to a lot of compaction and poor soil structure.
When conditions allow, we’ll sow in a winter cover crop,
grow a healthy sward of oats. We’ll keep all of that mass of material
that has grown in the mid rows, in the mid rows,
which suppresses weeds and holds the moisture there.
It's also important if there are rain events, then we have this mat
that allows us to access the vineyard with the tractor.
This is the trial we've been running with the DPI.
We've got crimson clover, dichondra,
and fescue in sequential rows.
We've also trialed perennial white clover in a different block, and
you can really see that there's differences in terms of the weed suppression,
in terms of the physical mat that it creates
and then the viticultural outcomes that has.
So, the crimson clover, for example, as an annual,
it will kind of arrive and smother out all of the other weeds, grow quite tall,
which can be a problem with our spray program and potential disease.
The fescue, and the white clover,
we've noticed quite a big decrease in vine vigor and pruning weights.
The dichondra is kind of ideal as this sort of permanent sward.
It's very fine rooted, very shallow rooted,
an amazing mat to suppress weed.
Dichondra has been a really incredible outcome in terms of the soil health,
the elimination of herbicides and also vine performance.
For our heavy clay soils, we've had better results
using the straw mulch as opposed to an undervine cover crop.
Underneath that straw mulch there,
you have a beautiful, rich, moist clay, whereas where there,
there's no mulch,
it's dry to the touch and very hard to break.
So, it's really helped to store water
and to hold water in the soil in the undervine area.
And we've aided that with our compost that we've made here on site from our marc,
so, the material which was left over after we pressed the wine off the grapes,
as well as some some trees which were mulched from the neighbor's property.
We planted garden beds just close
by vineyards to promote beneficial native insects.
The purpose of these beds
is to promote biodiversity, but the goal viticulturally
is to attract insects that will predate upon pests in the vineyard.
So, that's helped us to eliminate our pesticide use.
We've got the eucalyptus coming up, the prickly leaf tea tree.
All flowering through different times of the year too, so that we can sort of constantly,
you know, harbor these native species and attract pollinators.
In terms of how biodiversity rejuvenation goes
the riparian areas are very important.
We have lots of these creek beds bordering our vineyards and
not only planting native species and keeping the native species
that are there healthy,
what we can actually do is create windbreaks around the vineyard,
which makes it easier for us to do some vineyard operations,
but will also aid in successful flowering when that part of the year comes around.
We started seriously looking into our carbon footprint.
I certainly, and the family
wanted to see what that footprint was and how we could decrease it.
Not just on the farm, as far away as how the glass is manufactured
for our wine bottles,
but even down to the nitty-gritty things of how many litres of petrol we're using.
Emissions from fertiliser was a huge one.
We managed to reduce gross emissions from then to today by about 50%
and have been able to get to net zero.
When we calculated our carbon footprint,
one of the biggest sources of emissions was electricity.
And so a really important step for us was to install this solar array.
It's a 65 kilowatt system, so it generates a lot of power,
a lot more than you can actually use on a day to day basis.
It runs the winery, warehouse, vineyard,
all of the operational side of the business.
During peak periods like vintage, when we're running a lot of pumps,
using a lot of refrigeration, using a lot of machinery, it's
reduced our power use in terms of what we take from the grid by 90%.
Clearly, if we go to the worst case scenario,
then agriculture in Australia is going to become extremely difficult.
But if we can control temperature rise and keep it within a reasonable zone,
then using the techniques about, you know, increasing soil health,
the way that we plant the vineyards, the varieties
of which we plant in the vineyards, which I think is incredibly important,
can be tools that we'll use to adapt to the changing climate.
And there's a really promising future in the Hunter Valley for viticulture.
From our mindset,
the work that we're doing is to make sure that the vine condition is the strongest
as it can possibly be, with the best resilience to face
whatever weather conditions come our way into the future.