Water Management in Vineyards

The last few weeks have been hot and dry.

Most of my days have been spent watering the young vines. They simply won't survive their first years without a little help. At the same time, the grass for the sheep is disappearing faster every day. What was lush and green a few weeks ago is now turning brown. We have forage for another couple of weeks, and after that I will need to feed them hay.

This isn't entirely new, but the weather is becoming more extreme.

Instead of steady rainfall throughout the summer, we seem to get longer dry spells interrupted by short periods of very intense rain. Looking back over recent years, we've had exceptionally wet seasons like 2021, but also drought years such as 2018, 2022 and now 2026.

It has made me think about something much bigger than watering young vines.

If you look at the way many Swiss vineyards are designed, roads cut across the slopes every 50 to 100 meters. During heavy rain, these roads collect the runoff from the parcels above and channel it into drains. The water leaves the vineyard as quickly as possible.

In other words, we've engineered many vineyards to become dry as efficiently as possible.

Permaculture takes almost the opposite approach. There, every effort is made to slow water down, spread it across the landscape and allow it to soak into the soil. Every extra day that rainwater stays on the land is valuable.

So I'm asking myself whether it's time to rethink the water management of our own vineyard.

More water stored in the soil would certainly help the sheep through dry summers. It would also support the trees and shrubs that are gradually becoming part of our agroforestry system. On the other hand, one of the reasons great wines come from many classic wine regions is precisely because the vines experience a certain amount of water stress. Drier conditions often lead to smaller berries and more concentrated flavors.

So where is the balance?

How do we build a vineyard that is resilient to a changing climate while still making concentrated beautiful wines?

I don't have the answer yet. But these are exactly the kinds of questions that will shape the future of our vineyard over the coming years.