Animal Delinquents
There's more to wine fauna than cuddly kangaroos

            While the circus parade of monkeys, penguins and kangaroos marching across wine labels is this year’s news story, animals have been playing an important role in wine for much longer. But the real ones aren’t so kind and cuddly.

            In 2005, Italy watched as a plague of locusts devoured much of their Barbera crop.

            The same year, enormous flocks of starlings descended on vineyards in Austria and ate about 100,000 euros worth of grapes.

            In South Africa, the baboon is the bugaboo, not only eating the berries, but throwing things at workers who try to scare it off.

            Australia has wombats, big lumpen creatures that dig long tunnels for tractors to fall into.

            The vineyards of Germany are terrorized by Nazi Raccoons. Really. Introduced by Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering in 1934 to enrich Germany’s fauna, raccoons have no natural predators. Recently, a delinquent gang of them descended on the Brandenburg region, wiping out the entire grape harvest in days.

            France suffers wild boars, but don’t think they take it lying down. Always a country of action, they have decided to get the boars out of the vineyards by.feeding them in the vineyards. Truckloads of corn. If you think they’d understand that basic economic tenet: what you penalize you get less of and what you reward you get more of, then you haven’t seen their welfare system.

            But there are ways to fight back. Hoards of gophers, possums, feral cats and starlings have met their match in another animal: the falcon. From California to New Zealand, falconry is a growing trend in vineyard pest control. If you wince at the thought of furry woodland creatures shrieking as they’re carried off by gripping talons, well, get over it, because often a stern look from the raptor is all that’s required to clear the field.

            Animals, of course, have always helped out. Horses and donkeys have worked vineyards for centuries, pulling ploughs and hauling harvested grapes.

            At wineries worldwide, the official greeter is often a dog. And in a business where nose is king, dogs also play more technical roles. Golden retrievers have been trained to detect 2, 4, 6-trichloroanisole (TCA), the compound known for tainting cork-sealed wines. Bloodhounds are busy routing mealy bugs from the vineyards by sniffing out their sex pheremones. And wine critics like me often rely on dogs to ghostwrite our tasting notes. Well, we would if they weren’t such lousy spellers.   

            Some organic wineries employ the goat as a combination weeder/fertilizer; a cheap machine that requires no petrol. Goats are a lot of fun, but that Dennis-the-Menace charm can pall when they climb up trellises and eat everything they’re not supposed to.

            Sheep don’t climb, but they, too, eat the grapes. To combat this, some farmers use lambs who are too small to reach the first trellis line. But child labor is looked down upon in this country. At one point, a special breed of short sheep was developed, but the program got expensive. Then the University of California at Davis stepped in.

            Ever eat a bad oyster, or anything else that kept your face welded to the toilet seat all night? Bet you never ate it again. That’s called aversion therapy, and it’s what UCD did with sheep. They let them gorge on grape leaves, and then gave them a small dose of lithium chloride to make them queasy. Later, in the vineyard, the aversion-conditioned sheep wouldn’t go near the grapes.

            Sheep might have further promise in the winery, considering their discriminating palates: The untrained sheep who did eat the grapes were big chardonnay fans but tended to avoid aglianico.

            Sometimes it’s not the animal in the wine, but the wine in the animal. Washington state cattle rancher Lynne Chamberlain claims she’s discovered the secret to creating tender meat. She feeds her cattle a mixture of corn, molasses and leftover wine from her winery. She says it chills them out and keeps them lazy. Not that cows are exactly known for their type-A personality.  After all, with grain fermenting in any one of four stomachs at any given time, they comprise a kind of walking brewery. So the high demand for her steaks must be thanks to the wine, not just drunken cows.  Who, come to think of it, would make a great wine label.