Wijngaard Dassemus
The World’s Largest No-Spray Vineyard with Vitiforestry
For a dose of hope and imagination and a vision of beauty and permanence, for this episode I bring you Ron and Monique of Wijngaard Dassemus in the Netherlands. Ron and Monique are doing so much cool stuff all at once I don’t know where to begin. They are the largest commercial no-spray vineyard that I’m aware of, at 6 hectares or 15 acres, and they’re doing this in Holland… That means that the vines they grow are resilient to some pretty bad, wet weather… trust me, I spent a year there. And 2 hectares or 5 acres of that vineyard is a younger vitiforestry planting that will use trees as living trellis posts.
When you hear about how and why they use a high cordon trellising system, how and why they mow very sparsely, how and why they don’t need to add fertilizer, how and why they’ve chosen the tree partners in the vitiforestry block, and how this system lends itself to expressive wines… and so much more, you will see how incredibly caring and thoughtful they are about the ecology of every element of their system… and why I’m so thrilled to share this with you!
While there are folks doing pieces of what Ron and Monique are doing, I have yet to find anyone doing all of this in one vineyard… and they are doing it in a place that doesn’t even have a wine tradition, mostly because of the bad weather! I guess what I’m trying to say is… if they can do what they are doing where they are doing it… the rest of us have no excuses. Let your imaginations run wild!
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Tags: vitiforestry, no-spray vineyard, biodynamic vineyard, piwi grapes, hybrid grapes