Developing an integrated viticulture in the upper part of the hill Somló

The hill Somló looks like a huge island wich jumps out of the see, a few kilometers away from the slope of Bakony highland and on the edge of the Hungarian small plane. Viticulture has started on the slopes of the hill few thousand years ago, but because of the latest technological development and economical circumstances the copartners have developed a synchronized research program. In the frame of this program we have 8 very distinctive sub-projects. The projects are including the effect of rootstock on grapevine quality, the canopy management, the order of the steps and the quality cultivation, the evaluation of site effect and row direction of the plantation, the plant protection system and the fertilization of the vineyards. Differences were obtained in sugar content related alcohol content in the crop load management experiment, in the soil cultivation and fertilization experiment. The titratable acid content also varied by treatments, we have got the lowest value (5.44 g/l) in the higher N fertilization treatment in the V. vinifera cv ‘Italian Riesling’ vineyard, while the highest value (7.93 g/l) was in the mechanically cultivated experiment among other two kind of cultivation methods in the V. vinifera cv ‘Furmint’ plantation. It was measured the pH, the residual sugar content, the sugar free dry matter content and phenol compounds in a few experiments. Row direction, rootstocks crop load management, soil cultivation methods, and fertilization are very influential in the quality production as our results shows.