00:01Herding cattle to make better wine.
00:04This is the goal of winemakers at Hartenberg wine estate near Stellenbosch in South Africa.
00:10The historic estate has recently decided to let cattle, sheep and ducks roam free in its vineyards to improve its soil health.
00:19We are actually regenerating our soil by using less input from outside.
00:26Using nature as a tool to get the most benefits out of that, but in that same way with nature, improve our soil biology, our soil health, our plant health and at the end of the day the health of the fruit.
00:45The animal's dung fertilizes the ground which leads to better soil quality and more biodiversity, and in turn better wine.
00:54So with the study that we saw from last year that we did on the Shiraz block is that the control berries were larger than that of the grazed berries.
01:04So normally that will lead to higher quality wines with the smaller berries.
01:08The practice is called regenerative farming.
01:13As the impact of using livestock on a vineyard is little studied, Hartenberg wine estate has become the object of a three years long research project by Stellenbosch University.
01:24So we had a very interesting trial with comparing regenerative vineyard with a regenerative vineyard with livestock in it and what we found that the vineyard with livestock had a much lower alcohol.
01:43When I say much it's almost 0.5% alcohol lower and that in a sensory or perception of the wine point of view we found was showing much more elegant.
01:56We had a wine that had higher anthocyanins and tannins so there was more structure to the wine but at the same time there was finesse.
02:06With positive results for the quality of the wine, the cattle at the estate will likely continue grazing their way through the vineyard.
02:15the vineyard.
02:16the vineyard.
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