Despite all of the rain we had in May, suddenly a couple of our vineyards are suffering from lack of rain. The French have a saying: "un binage vaut deux arrosages" which translates into: "one hoeing is worth two waterings." Hmm doesn't sound so pretty through my translation, but in essence it's true. Last year we tried it at about this time when the same vineyards started to lose leaves at the base and the bunches of grapes actually started to shrivel up. We did a light ploughing and a couple of days later the grapes looked completely normal again, almost as if we had watered the vines!
In the bio-dynamic book that we use by François Bouchet it recommends that you plough lightly in the early evening in order to break the capillaries in the soil and allow it to breath. It's also beneficial when rain is predicted, thus the rain penetrates directly into the soil and doesn't run off.
The three vineyards that we plowed one grenache and our two newly acquired white vineyards have a sandy loam based soil which quickly turns hard when it stops raining. Matt had to go over them twice in order to get the plough to go in! The best part about plowing in the evenings is enjoying the sunset, we even had a little picnic at the end and finished off a bottle of Billecart rosé we had opened the previous day! Doesn't really seem like work, does it?
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