Climate change-related drought and yield losses further increase the economic unsustainability of steep slopes.
Current subsidies fall short of covering the economic disadvantage of manual and rope-assisted steep slopes. The cost disadvantage of steep slopes mainly stems from viticultural processes with limited mechanisability that require specialised equipment and many repetitions. Manual management of steep slopes was determined to be 2.6 times more costly than standard flat terrain viticulture. The net present value (NPV) of reshaping slopes into horizontal terraces was also assessed. The costs for standard viticultural processes were compared across five site types with different mechanisation intensities by univariate analysis of variance with fixed and random effects.
Costs were derived from a dataset of 2321 working time records for labour and machine hours from five German wine estates over three years. It also examined under what conditions the reshaping of steep slope vineyards into transversal terraces (TTs) is economically viable. This study quantified the production costs of different types of steep slopes, identified cost drivers within viticultural processes and assessed the impact of grape yield on the production cost for vertical shoot positioning (VSP) systems. The falling fallow of steep slope vineyards is caused by cost disadvantages that have not been analysed so far.
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