Biosecurity is interwoven into most vineyard and wine business activities in the Adelaide Hills. Sarah Carlson, Executive Officer of Adelaide Hills Wine, says growers and winemakers in the region are focused on keeping vineyards healthy and safe.
“Our level of biosecurity knowledge up here is pretty high. And because these are high-value vineyards, growers are pretty savvy about maintaining farm-gate hygiene standards,” Sarah said.
“We have several very good vineyard contractors in the Adelaide Hills and the use of machinery or equipment from outside the region is minimal, which keeps the risk of pest and disease spread low.
“Additionally, a lot of our harvesting is done either by hand or by smaller machinery that stays in the region, which provides another level of risk protection.”
Sarah said growers and winemakers in the Adelaide Hills are fortunate to have a detailed pest and disease resource available in CropWatch, a regular industry newsletter created by Richard Hamilton.
“Richard has such an incredibly deep, biosecurity-focused viticulture background, he’s aware of the pests and diseases that vineyard owners need to know about. That’s our first port of call in terms of understanding pest and disease issues and how they might relate to our region,” Sarah said.
Recent metro Adelaide fruit fly outbreaks have given growers and winemakers in the Adelaide Hills a taste of what outbreaks involve, as the region was caught up in fruit movement restrictions through vintage.
“The Adelaide Hills has been swept up in fruit fly restrictions over the last couple of years, so that has resulted in increased awareness around generalised biosecurity concepts,” Sarah said.
“Vineyard owners had to be ready to go with the right documentation for their grape loads, which gave us insight into how life would be if there was an outbreak of something nasty.
“No one wants that because it’s extra logistics, it’s extra documentation and it’s extra time spent during vintage when people don’t have much time.”
Uptake of the Sustainable Winegrowing Australia (SWA) program in the Adelaide Hills has seen vineyard owners in the region increase their use of biosecurity signage, such as Vinehealth Australia wine tourism biosecurity signs.
“Through SWA, we’ve definitely seen the uptake of vineyard signage increase, and growers are also paying more attention to their boundaries and addressing areas where there might be access to vineyards,” Sarah said.
“That’s important in the Adelaide Hills where we get a lot of day trippers who think it’s ok to wander into a vineyard to take pictures. That’s not something that we want to encourage.”
To educate cellar door staff about vineyard biosecurity, a question about biosecurity was introduced to the Adelaide Hills Wine Region’s Chanticleer Award criteria, an annual award for the cellar door of the year.
“It’s a secret shopper award where we have judges who go around the region and visit cellar doors that are self-nominated to be the cellar door of the year. A few years ago, we introduced a question regarding how cellar door staff communicate with visitors about not entering the vineyard, to see if that’s being integrated into dialogue with consumers.
“We’ve found that, across the board, cellar door staff are having conversations with visitors about not walking into vineyards, which is a really good outcome. I think for the most part, our cellar door staff are very savvy about biosecurity.”
When regional consumer events are held, wineries follow an event checklist, which includes questions about biosecurity.
“If wineries have a vineyard, we encourage barriers and signage during events to prevent visitors from entering vineyards,” Sarah said.
“And we never see consumer events held in vineyards. I don’t know anybody who would be foolish enough to take a bunch of consumers into their vineyards, not knowing where those people have been and what’s potentially on their shoes.”
When industry events are held in or near vineyards, conversations about biosecurity occur, visitor sign-in registers are used and, if needed, footbaths are used to disinfest shoes.
“For industry-focused events held in vines for a technical purpose, we know the participants are an educated group and usually locals. There is a conversation at the start to ask people where they have been in the past 29 days, so the risk is assessed from the outset,” Sarah said.
“We never have any pushback to those questions. People understand that pests like phylloxera can live away from grapevine roots for up to 29 days, so this is part of the risk assessment that needs to occur before vineyards are entered.”
Sarah said rootstock adoption was one area of phylloxera risk management that the Adelaide Hills has not addressed.
“We’ve got a very low rate of rootstocks planted in the Adelaide Hills – we have about 93% of vines on own roots – so we’d be pretty vulnerable if there was an outbreak of significance, such as phylloxera,” she said.