Unless you work in a vineyard you have probably never heard of Frolight. It’s a fairly recent innovation to prevent frost damage on young vine buds. Our long-term client Henschke Cellars has been trialling it in certain vineyards as an alternative to diesel generated frost fans, since frost fans are noisy and energy intensive. So the Tandem team took a road trip out to Henschke in the Barossa Valley to hear the Frolight sales pitch (all the way from Belgium) and see Frolight in action. We wanted to know if it would be a viable option to reduce carbon emissions in vineyard management.
- It uses infrared to heat the buds up to 15cm from the tube
- It comes in lengths up to 200m and uses 4 Watts per metre
- We calculated this means it uses 4L per hour of diesel to run up to 200m
- A frost fan uses 20L per hour of diesel but covers a much larger area
Henschke seem to be very happy in terms of the effectiveness of Frolight, ie. it prevents frost damage in a controlled manner. In terms of emissions generated, we think Frolight and frost fans about break even. It may be beneficial for small sections of vines which are vulnerable to frost, as you can string up as many rows as you need and not have to do the whole vineyard.
It’s certainly a very clever idea, and we love the added benefit of pretty fairy lights in your vineyard for the romantic ambience, but our judgement from the emissions side is that it is generally only beneficial to assist in emissions reduction if you have grid access in your vineyard, or a solar system. If you need a generator to run it, it’s unfortunately not going to improve your carbon footprint.
