vine spacing
The vineyard has been close planted by Australian standards at 4000 vines per hectare. Close planting allows the vines to compete with one another resulting in less vegetative growth and a lower yield per vine. This results in more concentrated fruit flavours. It also enables you to plant more vines on the best possible sites, and helps the vines to ripen the fruit more evenly.Historically vines rows in Australia were further apart to accommodate Massey Ferguson tractors. Most vineyards in Margaret River have therefore been established with 1.8 metres between the vines and 3 metres between the vine rows. This spacing gives a vine density of 1,852 vines per hectare.
There are now narrow tractors that allow the vine rows to be closer. It is also interesting to note that in France most vineyards are traditionally planted at spacings of 1metre between the vines and 1 metre between the rows. This gives a density of 10,000 vines per hectare.
