Vineyard management encompasses practices conducted in the vineyard associated with growing grapes and maintaining the vineyard resource. Wine Australia-funded research has focused on identifying environmentally sustainable inputs to viticulture and technologies that allow reductions in vineyard labour, without compromising grape quality.

Improving vineyard management is one of Wine Australia’s key strategies and includes information on the efficient use of resources to maintain and improve Australian vineyards. Current research projects can be found here.

Vineyards are variable in both space and time

Temporal variation is primarily driven by climate and seasonal variation in weather. For example, cold periods at flowering or fruitset can reduce yield while warm temperatures at bud initiation will tend to increase next year’s yield (assuming there are no subsequent perturbations such as frost in the following season). As consequence, seasonal variation in yield and quality is inherently difficult to predict, which is why Wine Australia invests significantly in improved methods for yield estimation and fruit quality assessment.

Meanwhile, land is variable and therefore its productivity is too. For this reason, there is no such thing as a uniform vineyard and many vineyard attributes (soils, topography, vine vigour, yield, fruit composition) can be seen to be variable when the vineyard is under conventional uniform management. 

Wine Australia has been an active partner in research into spatial variability in vineyards and supports projects that seek to better enable growers to measure, map and understand their variability, and understand the interaction between grape yield and quality.

This section provides resources and factsheets to assist vineyard management and includes information on biodiversity, canopy management, cover crops, managing vineyard variability, post-harvest care, soil health, tannin, terroir and vineyard profitability.