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Hydroponic Wine?! · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hello and welcome back to Hydroponics Daily. I'm Dr.
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  Russell Sharp, your host, and this is the go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
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  And if we're talking soilless cultivation of today's topic, then it could be
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  considered heresy by many of the people who currently grow this crop.
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  And the crop is grapes, or more specifically, grapes for wine production.
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  And there is a lot of strong opinions
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  lots of received wisdom lots of
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  research in grapes and the idea that
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  you could grow a grape some
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  some grapes that were good enough to make wine with hydroponically would
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  be shocking to many people so we'll go
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  into whether that is potentially possible and everyone's if
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  anyone's done it already or what would need to be overcome
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  to create that then we'll go
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  through all of that today so as i say it's it's a very it would be it would
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  cause a massive stir in the industry if you could grow wine hydroponically and
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  that's why i wanted to look at it today so i did some research and basically
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  found that no one's doing this so it's a untapped market.
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  The hydroponic wine industry and but i think it'd be of interest to a lot of
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  hydroponic growers because a lot of us like to pride ourselves on the quality
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  of the produce we can produce hydroponically.
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  But no one's doing it yet. So there is a number of Reddit users,
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  as always, who have tried it, but no one has actually done it commercially.
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  Obviously, you need to be using the wine variety that is useful for wine production and the species.
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  There's only one species used,
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  that's Vitus vinifera, one of my favourite Latin or scientific names.
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  I like to put it along with hops, humulus, luplus, and ivy, heterohelix, so vitis vinifera.
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  It's a bit like Boris Becker. I don't know what the term is for that,
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  where you've got the first name and the second name begins from the same letter,
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  but vitis vinifera, I like it.
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  Obviously, particularly suited to Mediterranean regions, and there are different
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  varieties that make different types of wines and things like this,
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  but there's potential for producing wine.
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  Now, the good news is because no one's done it already and it's a massive it
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  would cause a massive stir even if you produced enough grapes for one bottle of wine.
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  And you could produce a bottle of wine that was made hydroponically,
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  you would get so much publicity in numerous articles that it'd be worth the effort.
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  And you might not produce a yield, but it wouldn't be about producing yield.
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  It would be basically to showcase something else.
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  So if you're looking for a topic to run hydroponically, maybe you're a university
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  or a school, and you want to collaborate on this, then I'm more than happy to collaborate.
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  And you want to get some publicity for your organization then cultivation of
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  great great vines would be really interesting and the reason why it would be particularly.
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  Contentious is because there's lots of things around the
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  terroir terroir or what i
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  don't speak french terroir of wine like the mystical
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  not really scientific but like the
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  the soil imbues on the vines and
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  so like at the the loire valley the champagne
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  region napa valley places like this where
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  the terroir has an amazing influence on the wine and you you could potentially
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  upend all of that and produce a wine that was grown using either synthetic or
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  organic inputs in a hydroponic system maybe a deep water system or aeroponically can you imagine that,
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  where the vines were growing in that sort of system so that's
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  what i'm thinking of and then if you said that the wine produce
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  could potentially rival some of these regions then
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  that would really kick up a stink and the the old
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  heads in the wine industry would sort of steam would
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  be coming out of their ears potentially there's a benefit there
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  because you wouldn't need to use a root stock because there's no root aphids
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  that could potentially attack you if you're going in dwc you could keep
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  the pest and disease out so you wouldn't need to use rootstocks
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  you potentially wouldn't need to use the horrible copper fungicides they use
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  grapevines so that's another advantage you could potentially produce a better
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  wine there obviously it's a perennial crop and there's your key issue there
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  is that you would have to be able to grow the vines for many many years and
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  so they would need to have balanced nutrition and they wouldn't.
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  Produce a harvestable crop for maybe three or four years they also
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  require cold dormancy so you would need to be able
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  to chill chill them during the winter season
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  but you potentially could warm them up sooner and get
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  the growing system system going earlier on in
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  the year and you if you're in protected grow room
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  or greenhouse then the flowers wouldn't get damaged
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  in the spring frosts and that's where a lot of damage and
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  a lot of the cost of growing wine
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  growing wine growing grapes for wine is is
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  is lost in that area there so there's
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  potential there you could potentially use robots for for for
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  pruning the the vines that's a
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  big area where it's lost and also if you're not allowing rain
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  to get onto the leaves then you're reducing things like the spore
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  splash due to that causes downy mildew and
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  and gray mold and powdery
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  mildew and all these sorts of diseases that affect the the
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  vines no requirement for insecticides if
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  you can keep them out you can optimize the temperature obviously vines
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  love 22 to 28 degrees celsius and you
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  could mess around with the light spectrum and things like this to produce to
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  increase the anthocyanins and the pigments in the particular grapes you're growing
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  for i'd probably go for a white wine rather than a red wine to begin with just
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  because they seem to be more tolerant of unoptimal suboptimal conditions but
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  maybe if you're in a more tropical or Mediterranean region.
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  You might go for a red wine type. I don't know...
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  The issues around producing wine so which one would produce the most wine but
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  that's something you can consider you wouldn't need to look at the weather when
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  it comes to harvesting as well so you could harvest whenever you wanted to when
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  was optimum and you could you if you you could potentially look at the benefits
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  the more sustainable aspect obviously you're using.
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  Synthetic fertilizers but lots of vineyards do use synthetic fertilizers
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  but you could reduce water use by 70-90% if
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  you were in a recirculatory system I don't
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  know how many vines you would need to produce one bottle of
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  wine but I wouldn't have thought it's too many you
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  could certainly a large size grow room could produce enough
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  I would imagine to produce a bottle of wine and even
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  a fairly small greenhouse you
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  could do it as well so you could you could certainly release
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  a press release after you've done it and you get a lot of attention obviously
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  if you wanted to commercialize it that's a whole different ball
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  game and you would really have
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  to have a unique selling point and people would
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  have to be a want for the product maybe you could do you find
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  that you can produce an amazing wine with this
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  technique there's something about growing them hydroponically no
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  one's ever tried it before or certainly no one's ever tried it
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  at scale so there might be a real opportunity there for
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  a particular wine one of the key things is you're
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  going to need low nitrogen once they start to flower and fruit low
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  nitrogen is going to be key to make sure the.
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  Flowers aren't the fruits aren't in
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  shade and they get good air circulation and light levels
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  and then calcium is going to be key as well so
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  vines love limestone soil or limey
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  soil and that's because of the calcium content so making
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  sure you've got a good calm mag in there it's going to be absolutely essential really
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  high calm mag levels i would have thought and low nitrogen levels certainly
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  a number of universities and such have looked at studying growing grapes hydroponically
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  to look at not only to see if they can produce grapes hydropodically but also.
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  Look at nutrient management things like this and and to be,
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  look at the effects of different nutrient deficiencies or toxicities but
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  i don't think anyone's really taken it to the next level and looked at wine production
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  i would imagine the ec values are just slightly higher
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  than what we talked about yesterday in basil and then the heat
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  airflow and then that requirement for artificial
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  dormancy in the winter vines need some support so
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  you need to factor that in so if i a vine
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  as the name suggests just like a tomato vine would need some
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  sort of trellis or some something to
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  grow up maybe not as severe as they are outdoors because
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  you've not got the wind and the storms so you
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  could get away with twine they could grow up twine whereas
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  outdoors they grow on metal wire between
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  wooden posts you wouldn't need go
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  to have to go to that extremes if you're growing indoors because they're
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  not getting blasted by really high winds once
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  or twice a year so i think there's
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  a massive potential there i think if you certainly
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  just from a from a pr perspective but
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  maybe more so let me know if you think you can
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  do it if you'd like to collaborate if you've already done it but you haven't
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  publicized it then let me know and let me know some of your experiences doing
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  that so as i say if you'd like to collaborate on something like this then please
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  get in touch if you're looking for advice on various imports specialist inputs
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  then let me know we already supply at utreema a number of different vineyards around the UK.
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  Around England, not the UK, not many in Scotland or Northern Ireland,
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  but certainly in the south of England, we are big when it comes to vines, grapevines and hops.
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  They're particularly good sectors for our products, our specialist inputs.
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  As I say, we hate copper fertilisers at Utrema, and so we make a big deal of
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  trying to remove copper fertilisers from wine production.
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  It's got to be good for soil biology human biology and for the the wine itself
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  so yeah that's been hydroponic study for today the potential for hydroponic
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  wine and until tomorrow thank you very much for listening.