KOBLENZ, GERMANY (dpa) – German vintners are changing the shape of their vineyards to improve the quality of their wines.
Many are switching from traditional up-down rows of vines to broad horizontal terraces on their steep vineyards along the Moselle and Rhine rivers.
The terraces measure two metres wide and many metres long, and vines are planted at an angle only along the edges, with enough room behind them for vintners’ small tractors. This allows them to tend the soil and the plants by machine, and only the harvesting is still done by hand.
“I can only plant 3,000 vines per hectare on my new terraces instead of 4,500,” said Martin Hautt, a vintner in Winningen, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
“This reduces the harvest but it means I have less than 500 working hours per hectare instead of 1,300.” It also improves the quality of his grapes, he says, because the vines get more sun and air.
Many Swiss vintners have been working with such horizontal terraces for decades, but they are still rare in Germany.
In Baden-Wuerttemberg they are only to be seen at Ortenau on the Upper Rhine and at Lake Constance. But now the first terraces are appearing along the Moselle River in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany’s biggest wine producing state.
The hilly vineyards in this region are well-suited to the horizontal terraces which are ideal on inclines of between 30 and 60 degrees. Steeper vineyards do not leave a large enough turning circle for the tractors, and on less steep hills, the tractors can drive uphill directly.
The new horizontal terraces on the Moselle banks around Koblenz, Winningen and Cochem are now attracting interest from other German vintners.
“We have already seen an influx of interested vintners,” said Gerd Kohlhaas of the Mayen Kulturamt, the office for reparcelling agricultural land in the region. Among other things, the office helps vintners buy or exchange the larger areas of land necessary for planting horizontal terraces.
The reorganization of the land is carried out by a specialist company which works for a number of days in the spring with mechanical diggers and bulldozers. “It costs 40,000 marks (around 18,000 U.S. dollars) per hectare,” said Kohlhaas.
The state of Rhineland-Palatinate, the German government and the European Union are contributing between 60 and 90 per cent of the cost in an attempt to help vintners, who are increasingly abandoning the art of wine production in the face of high costs.
Producer prices for white wines have fallen dramatically after years of over-production.
“The Moselle Valley lost around 600 hectares of vineyards only this year,” said Kohlhaas.
“That is the same amount as the whole wine-growing district of Ahrtal,” he said. Ahrtal is an appellation in its own right. If the trend were to continue at this rate, the 10,000 hectares of vineyards in the Moselle would be halved within 10 years.
This would also be a blow to tourism: the picturesque Moselle vineyards with their ancient dry walls characterize the romantic river valley landscape.
While the large modern horizontal terraces will change the look of the vineyards, they will keep the hills green in winter because they are covered in grass, and they are more ecologically sound than deserted vineyards full of bush. What is more, many of the old dry walls can be integrated into the modern horizontal terraces.
