04/07/2018 – Pheromones

It stinks.

Huge even.

So the pheromones.

And by that I mean those weird red spaghetti.

If you’ve ever walked through the vines when it’s finally getting warmer in spring, you’ll sometimes come across mass hikes by motivated winegrowers. Most carry a small basket and some come with gloves.

Warmth and gloves might seem like an oxymoron, but it’s not. It’s pure selfishness, because who wants to be mistaken for that after hanging up the pheromone traps?

Once you get the smell on your hands, it’s hard to get rid of it. You smell it all day long, no matter how hard you scrub your hands. Maybe 4711 Original Eau de Cologne will help. But whatever. The work has to be done if these cute little moths that they are aren’t going to lay little mean eggs and worms in the grapes. Then that’s the end of the fun.

The eggs become caterpillars and are hungry. They like to nurse it in the vines. It would go beyond the scope here to see how this happens over the course of the unfortunately several generations of this genus, but I can tell you: the result – over the year – is not pleasing and must be kept in check. This can be done in an environmentally friendly way with the pheromone traps that are hung across the board so that only a few grape moths, or at best no grape moths at all, get lost in the vines. That may be utopian, but one can hope.

So far, the method has been quite reliable, but with such measures, everyone really has to play their part. That’s why the delivery dates for the “spaghetti” that you so often see hanging in the vines are always collected.