Sheep labour
Drink Four-legged labourers strip vine leaves to help premium grapes bear fruit at Ontario winery
VINELAND, Ont. - They're barely a few months old, and register around knee height, but the 40 fledgling recruits at Featherstone Estate Winery haven't wasted any time getting down to business.
Their job? Chowing down.
This quaint estate winery and vineyard set on a lush nine hectares in the Niagara heartland is making use of sheep labour to help clear grape leaves in and around where clusters of the delectable fruit grow.
Despite a stifling humidity, the furry, four-legged labourers, including Texel, Southdown and Scottish Blackface breeds, amble effortlessly up, down and across sloping, towering rows of neatly tucked vines.
A chorus of bleats occasionally bellow out as the lambs alternate between grazing on grass and taking aim at tugging and gnawing at the leaves encircling the pea-sized grapes dangling overhead.
But their leaf-clearing effort isn't just for esthetic appeal: it also plays a hand in helping boost the quality of the grapes and the eventual end product that will filter into wine bottles.
"If you can remove the leaves from around where the grape clusters are, those grapes get exposed to sunlight, and then they dry off more quickly in the morning so that you don't have humidity," said Louise Engel, who co-owns Featherstone with her husband, David Johnson, the senior winemaker.
"Exposing the grapes to sunlight just helps them to ripen as well, but it also helps them to keep really clean so they're much less prone to mould or mildew."
The practice of leaf removal is nothing new, done either by hand or machine. Johnson said it would ordinarily cost about $500 a hectare and involve a crew of up to 20 people at a time to do it at Featherstone.
"It's a horrendous job because it's just at that ugly point of bending over when you've got to bend over and strip leaves off," he said. "If you're short it's ideal, but if you're tall, it's a killer."
But while touring some vineyards in New Zealand prior to harvest early last year, where he was hired on at a winery in the Hawkes Bay region, Johnson commented to the field manager about how flawless the leaf-free vines appeared.
With a population of roughly three million people and about 10 times the number of vines relative to Ontario, Johnson was curious how the island country renowned for its wines accomplished the task.
The answer left him thinking he was having the proverbial wool pulled over his eyes.
"He said, 'Actually, we use sheep,' and I thought they were kidding, you know, having fun with a tourist or something," recalled Johnson, sitting on the veranda of the couple's 1830s farmhouse overlooking their Niagara region vineyard.
"So I asked a number of other places and they said, 'No, no, New Zealand is more famous for sheep than wine.' They have 60 million sheep down there. They call them white rocks because you think it's a rock in the field and then it moves. They're everywhere you can think of."
After returning home, Johnson decided to give sheep labour a trial run.
Last summer, Featherstone brought in five sheep and put them in the Riesling field in and among five fenced-off rows, with all the winery staff "watching them like hawks."
While they may be game to gobble up the leaves, the natural concern was that setting the woolly ones loose on the bread and butter of the operation could be risky business.
As it turned out, any fears about the sheep eating the grapes quickly dissipated.
"Right now, they're pea-sized and... they're either too bitter or too tart - I haven't decided which - but they won't touch them," Johnson said.
"These animals just really want foliage and a lot of it."
What's more, they've found that the time sheep take to strip the leaves is very similar to that of humans.
The animals don't resist the temptation of the forbidden fruit forever. By the time the grapes get sweet, come fall, the winemakers will have to pull the sheep out or they will eat the fruit, giving them about six weeks to get all the leaf-pulling done.
Johnson said the sheep, obtained from three Ontario farms, were always raised with the intention that they would go to market. The animals will be sold to area restaurants once their vineyard work wraps up.
In addition to the bonus of a natural fertilizer from sheep manure, the use of sheep has translated into other benefits for Featherstone.
"The leaf-pulling they're doing certainly improves our wine, there's no question about that," Johnson said. "The wines are more intense, we have lower disease pressure in the grapes because they're exposed to the sun."
"There's a real effect from that we can trace. It's because of the leaf-pulling."
In tribute to their woolly workers, Featherstone has named a wine in their honour, with the 2007 Black Sheep Riesling VQA for the sheep that worked the field last year. It's a tradition Johnson said they plan to maintain from now on.
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