Our vines can get attacked by many plagues and diseases, ranging from lice, mosquitos, leafhoppers, rot and mildew to much more nasty things. As we farm organically, we do much preventive work to avoid these diseases instead of having to cure them after they’ve attacked our precious vines.
We divide all these in two main categories: namely diseases and plagues. Diseases are caused by fungi, bacteria etc and plagues by insects etc.
Hail; beside diseases and plagues we sometimes experience hailstorms and these can cause devastating damage to our plants. Very fortunately; we very rarely get hail at Mallorca, but when it happens, and at the worst time of the year, it doesn't only cause damage to the leaves of the plants, but also the grapes like it did in the early summer of 2023 where especially our Chardonnay was hit in early June.
This is how our Chardonnay looked after the hailstorm of June 2023:
When the grapes are hit and their skin torn, this creates "open wounds" for bacteria and fungi etc to thrive in. All these damaged grapes needs to be sorted away at the sorting table during harvest and this requires a LOT of extra work. Plus, depending on the severity of the hailstorm can cause a great decrease in yield.
The diseases we typically deal with are;
Mildew; downy/false mildew and powdery mildew/oidum; you can read mere about this and see some pics of how it affect our vines under the library post on "Mildew" here
The plagues we usually deal with are;
Green Leafhopper; a a tiny grasshopper that attacks the leaves. You can read much more about that little "sucker" here
Snails; they actually don't really cause harm to our plants though it can look a bit dramatic when a whole big family decide to summer "hibernate" to hide from the scorching sun on one of our vines, in the picture below a Callet plant:
