The company has vineyards in the area near the Pouzdranská Steppe, and the company’s employees set off with candles to places where the frost had previously been able to torment them.
“We have thirty-eight hectares of vineyards. We lit candles on six hectares. We don’t light them everywhere, based on previous experience we know the locations, such as those frost basins, where there is the greatest risk of temperature drops. Here, if you look around, you can see that we are in a hole. That’s why we lit candles in the entire vineyard,” explained winery director Ondřej Stejskal.
“In the vineyard where we were burning candles, the thermometer showed a two-hour frost of minus one degree. There will be some crop damage, but we seem to have saved the bulk of the crop. Riesling Riesling will not be missing from the menu. That is, of course, if nothing else happens until the harvest,” said the director. He has not yet confirmed whether it will be given the nickname paraffin as a reminder that the heat of paraffin candles saved the crop. Nevertheless, people joked about such a name during the night event in the vineyard.
Candles help, but they are not cheap
Burning candles can help against the cold, but this is not a cheap matter. For example, orchardists state that one night of burning in a one-hectare orchard costs from thirty to sixty thousand crowns, depending on the density of the distribution.
“We’ve had candles since 2018, when one piece cost over two hundred crowns, we bought two thousand of them, so in total it’s less than half a million crowns. We’ve only used them once so far, so we’re drawing on old stock,” added Stejskal. On the cost side, they still have to add the salary for people. Twenty people were in action to place the candles in the rows of the vineyard. On the second night, roughly half was enough to light the ignition and replace the burnt ones.
Excellent promised fruit growers support, damages will exceed a billion
Economy
Tags: Hundreds burning candles helped winegrowers save grape harvest
