Andrew Peace Wines has an ambitious plan to grow the family-owned vineyard to 1000+ ha.
Stockade tools are helping them to get there faster and more efficiently.
Based in Piangil, Mallee region of Victoria Australia, Andrew Peace Wines is already one of Australia’s largest family-owned wineries. It has grown from humble beginnings to a contemporary, commercial winery using first-class technology.
Anthony Fedele is Andrew Peace Wines’ vineyard manager. All up, he looks over 544 ha of vines in Piangil alone. Combined with the other two properties in Wongary and Robinvale, they grow in excess of 18000 tonnes of wine grapes for their own winery. In 2021 they crushed a total of just under 50000 tonnes.
By his own description, he is the ‘fix it man’, managing projects on site for the last 17 years. Anthony says they are “insanely busy”.
Two years ago, Anthony was managing a project to extend the vineyards by 100 ha of vines. He began by constructing pine post trellis systems.
“When we do this sort of development, we bring on about 25 contractors as all post, wire, and irrigation as all this is done in-house. A team of 10 are usually equipped with a hammer, pouch, and staples. That’s how we used to fix the wire to the post. With 740 posts per hectare, we are running two wires every row. That’s around 148000 staples. It takes a lot of time to nail by hand and hammer, not to mention the blisters.”
Anthony got a hold of a Stockade ST400i cordless stapler to complement the hand hammering work during the extension project. Things changed.
“We brought the ST400i cordless stapler. It arrived pretty quick. Then we saw how efficient it was. What one person could do in a day with a stapler, took another three or four people with a hammer. It was fairly easy to do the calculation from there. We thought this would be a good investment. Stockade ST400i cordless staplers would pay for themselves in a few days with the price of contract wages.”
“We liked that they had a great safety function. When working with a contractor, a simple and safe tool is very important. With the ST400i, you can’t accidentally pull the trigger and fire a staple.”
Straight away AP Wines bought three. It was the right move.
“One hundred hectares of trellis was done and dusted in no time at all, putting us ahead of schedule to continue other tasks. I estimate it reduced AP Wines’ labour cost on that part of the project by at least two-thirds.”
The speed of the installation got noticed in the district.
“The next-door neighbour asked how we did it. I showed him the cordless staple tool — ‘so versatile and easy to work up and down the rows without the hassle of a compressor, hose or motorbike, and how simple it was to adjust the depth of the staple. One battery goes all day.’
He did ask if the tool got heavy. Although they looked heavy, they really aren’t. It’s just a matter of holding the weight all day so we got whipper snipper harnesses which did the trick. He tried one of ours. Now has his own.”
“The ST400i stapler tool is a great product. Big thumbs up from the Andrew Peace Wines team.”
