Ensuring the Dog Book stays the grower’s best friend

There’s more to the ‘Dog Book’ than meets the eye and no small amount of work involved in keeping it up to date and reliable.

The 28 pages of the booklet the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) officially calls Agrochemicals registered for use in Australian viticulture include 3 distinct sections and recommendations for dealing with 20 different vineyard pests, from Black Spot to Wingless Grasshoppers.

You can choose products using 62 different active constituents for fungicides, 32 for herbicides, 39 for insecticides and 5 for plant growth regulators. And that’s just the constituents; there are even more actual products. As Senior Viticulturist Marcel Essling notes ‘There’s a bit of chemistry out there’.

Every year, Mr Essling and colleague Anne Lord contact each of the more than 60 firms that provide products for the viticultural sector to check that their products are still available, listed and approved for use on wine grapes and that they want them to stay in the book.

The more complicated part comes when new products are launched or existing products change. The AWRI has to confirm that the product testing produced results appropriate to Australian conditions and then, after consulting with a sector-led agrochemical reference group, make a recommendation about product use. That’s the Dog Book’s core role.

‘Dog Book restrictions on use are often very different from what’s on the product label because we are working to meet export market requirements’, Mr Essling said.

‘The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority approves products and their use pattern to meet Australian maximum residue limits – or MRLs – but some countries to which Australia exports wine have lower MRLs or allow for no residue at all. We work out the restrictions to match the toughest MRL that we know about.’

The restrictions are quite specific – for example, use ‘no later than 80 per cent capfall’ or ‘no later than E-L 29, berries pepper-corn size’ – but they are guidelines not rules. Where wine won’t be exported or is only destined for specific countries, growers can be more flexible. And often ad hoc decisions need to be made.

‘We might get a call from a grower saying the book recommends E-L 29 but they’ve already gone past that, can they go back and use that product’, Mr Essling said. ‘We would ask which market the product is going to and make a recommendation based on the MRL.

‘Similarly, a winery might ring and say that they had picked earlier than expected and ask if that was likely to cause any issues.’

While only reprinted once a year (most recently in May), the Dog Book is regularly updated online and there is also a mobile app. The AWRI releases an Agricultural update eBulletin whenever changes are made – some are minor, others more significant.

‘A couple of years ago we had to make a change and recommend against using captan’, Mr Essling said. ‘It was unfortunate because it controlled a number of different diseases and resistance wasn’t an issue, but the EU changed its MRL so we had to respond. There was no safe way to use it for wine destined for the EU.’

Products don’t have to be listed in the Dog Book but growers do tend to favour those that are.

And the name? The title is a bit of a mouthful so when the picture of a Customs dog appeared on the front of the 1998–99 edition, it quickly just became known as the ‘Dog Book’.