On Deer Fences and Surgery

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Bob Garsson

With the new vines in the ground and growing beautifully, the need for a deer fence was growing ever more urgent.  Deer are only one of many pests that will go after the grapes once the fruit reaches a certain level of sweetness, but they will also go after the shoots themselves.  With all the work we put into this small hobby vineyard, we don’t want the vines to end up becoming a

The entire property has a three-board fence, with added wire meshing — good for keeping critters off the property, but not high enough to stop deer.

McDonalds for the local deer population.

This seemed like an easier task than putting in the trellising system, but even so, we spent a fair amount of time researching deer fences over the previous month.  In our division of labor, I had worked out the details on the trellis, and my wife, the Vineyard Goddess, devoted herself to the deer fence.

Traveling around area vineyards, we got a sense of the variety of fences that were being used.  Some vineyards have installed metal fences as high as 10 feet, but that seemed like overkill for us.

Our property is already surrounded by a four-foot high, three-board wood fence that has a metal mesh fence attached to keep small critters out and our two Vineyard dogs in. We briefly toyed with the idea of doing something to raise the height of that fence by another four feet all around the property, but rejected that approach for two reasons.

And here Glory is demonstrating why a separate fence around the vineyard itself is absolutely essential.

First, it’s a whole lot of fence — about 1,100 feet.  For about $8 a foot, we probably could have put in a fence that would be way more utilitarian than aesthetically pleasing, but this property will someday be our home, so we’re going for aesthetically pleasing.  And second, while it would keep our dogs from wandering off the property, it would do absolutely nothing to keep them out of the relatively smaller vineyard area inside our property.

Phoeneix, the vineyard dog isn’t so much of a problem by himself.  He shows a certain amount of respect as he moves among the vines, and when he plops himself down, it is almost always in a position that seems  protective — as though he is guarding the vines.  On the other hand, Glory, the vineyard dog in training, is still a puppy and far less respectful of the vines.  She hasn’t done any damage yet, save for the one dormant vine she began nibbling on while we were planting, but she likes tearing through the vineyard at warp speed, and it’s only a matter of time before something goes.  And when the two of them are together, it’s Glory raised to the power of something greater than two.  There have been times when the sight of the two of them racing through the vineyard has nearly stopped my heart.

The Wineries Unlimited trade show in Richmond in March gave us an opportunity to talk to a number of companies that sell deer fencing, and we settled on DeerBusters, which makes a black

Here’s the first of the line posts for the eight-foot deer fence – note the eight pound sledge hammer on the ground, used by Christ and Kate to pound the post sleeves into the ground.

hard plastic mesh fence that appears invisible from even a short distance away (although the poles are quite visible). The Vineyard Goddess did the research and placed the order.  When we arrived in Afton Saturday (May 5), we had $3,500 worth of deer fence, packed in 21 boxes, waiting for us.  We ran into a few difficulties getting it installed that probably aren’t worth going into, but the main problem was the surgery I was scheduled for a few days later.

The surgery was a level four anterior cervical discectomy and fusion, which means that they were going to remove four disks, replace them with some bone graft, and put a titanium plate over the verterbrae to hold eveything in place until the graft sets. The Vineyard Goddess and my daughter, Kate, both decreed that in anticipation of the surgery I would not be allowed to do any heavy lifting, much less any pounding.  Believe me, they weren’t taking no for an answer.  So the two of them pounded 17 two-foot steel inserts, or sleeves, into the ground on their own.  The sleeves make life a bit easier; they are short enough to drive into the ground with a sledge hammer, and once they’re planted, the poles slip right in, providing eight feet of pole above ground to hold the fence.

I have to say, it was pretty impressive watching these two women do all of the heavy work that I originally had planned to do myself.  In fact, they were amazing.

But I did do a a couple of things.  I brought the heavy materials down to the vineyard (Thank God for a tractor with a strong diesel engine and a front-end loader), I mowed the grass, and I helped attach the highest part of the deer fence to the poles. I also spent some time removing the dirt hills from the white grape vines, and I have to say that the Petit Manseng and the Viognier are looking magnificent!  I won’t be able to go down to the Nelson Country vineyard for a while, but Chris and Kate will finish unhilling the reds in another week. The whites went in a week earlier, and have a head start, but the reds look as though they are running close behind.

It was truly one of the most physically demanding weekends we’ve put in since starting the vineyard — definitely more difficult than the weekends we planted the vines.  And the Vineyard Goddess put in the most effort of all.  While I was back up in the house, enjoying a glass of Blenheim Vineyards Table Red (a lovely blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Syrah), Chris tromped back down to the vineyard to spray the vines at twilight and do the final cleanup.

We were all too tired to return to Fairfax that night, so we stayed over and left at 5:30 a.m. Got in a long day at the office, and was ready for surgery at Virginia Hospital Center Tuesday morning.  The good news is that the surgery, performed by Dr. Charles Riedel (I keep forgetting to ask him if he’s related to the Riedels who make the wine glasses, but it seems like a good omen either way) went exceptionally well.  I’ll be out of commission with respect to the vineyard for a while, but Chris and Kate seem more than capable of handling the work.  In point of fact, Chris is the vineyard manager, and I pretty much just take orders from her.  And thanks to her efforts, I think we’re on the way to having a pretty fabulous hobby vineyard!

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The Great Experiment — Transplanting Cab Franc

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Bob Garsson

Another busy weekend in the vineyard.  We transplanted four Cab Franc vines from Fairfax, researched and ordered a deer fence, and installed the bottom, or fruiting wire on our trellises in Afton.  And, of course, we spent some time admiring the fruit of our labors from the previous few weeks – 150 new vines buried under mounds of dirt.  The reds, which

Three weeks after planting, the Viognier, pictured here, and the Petit Manseng, are emerging from the mounds of dirt that protected them from the spring frosts.

we planted two weekends ago, were still hidden away, but the whites we planted a week earlier – the Petit Manseng and the Viognier – were poking through the hills, and we were just thrilled to see them pushing through the earth!  I have to say, they emerged from the mounds at just the right time, avoiding the frost that killed off our two prize Mammolo Toscano vines the previous weekend.  Frost is an issue that we’ve been giving a lot of thought to after our experience this winter, and it influenced our decision on where to locate the fruiting wire.  More on that in a future post.

For today, I’ll simply focus on our grand experiment, the transplanting of four of our Cab Franc vines from Fairfax to the Afton vineyard.  We had planted a total of seven Cab Francs in Fairfax to get a bit of hands on experience close to home.  I suppose at the back of my mind I thought I might eventually make a little wine from those vines, but mostly I

The Fairfax vines looked magnificent this Spring -- if a bit unruly. They need to be pruned, but that, I decided, would wait until they reached their new home.

wanted the experience of being able to go out in the evening after work to care for them and learn from that effort.  We planted another five of the same clone and rootstock in Afton to see how the same vines would do in a different environment.

The Fairfax vines grew fast and they looked just beautiful.  Clearly, the soil in Fairfax is rich, lending itself to high vigor growth.  That’s good and bad, but probably mostly bad.  It’s great to see the vines shoot up quickly, but ideally, we’d like them to struggle a bit so that the energy of the plant goes toward the grapes, not the vine itself.  Left to its own, the vine will grow as high as it can find support – up a tree, for example, pushing toward the sunlight – but spectacular as that vine might be, it’s not going to give you much, if anything, in the way of fruit.

By contrast, the Nelson vines were much more restrained in their

Each vine went into water after it was dug up, but they went into shock almost immediately

growth.  If the Fairfax group seemed to be growing too quickly, we worried that the Nelson vines would never amount to anything at all.  By the end of last year, they were not as tall as the Fairfax vines, but I convinced myself they had expended their energy in developing a solid root system, which is what we want them to do in the first year.

In any event, we didn’t expect we would ever harvest enough grapes in Fairfax to make a decent amount of wine, so moving them seemed to be a good idea.  Wes Hagen, of Clos Pepe Vineyards, and a columnist for WineMaker magazine, gave us the idea (although he can’t be blamed for any failures in the way we executed it).  He recommends that you order more vines

The Vineyard Goddess works her magic in replanting the Cab Franc

than you intend to plant, with the excess going into a small plot of ground near the vineyard.  Since every vineyard experiences the loss of 1 or 2 percent of the vines it plants, the extra vines can be dug up and replanted in place of the vines that didn’t make it.

So, why not try moving the Fairfax vines?  They looked incredibly healthy this year.  The leaves were free from disease and they seemed just about perfect.  In half-hour before we left for Afton, I dug up four of them, put them in a bucket of water and then moved them into a watertight plastic garbage bag, with the roots wrapped in wet, shredded newsprint.  They went into shock right away, with the leaves drooping

The transplanted vine struggles, successfully, we hope

noticeably, but we were only two hours away from Afton, and I figured we’d have them in the ground shortly after we arrived.

We planted them immediately, and while they still appeared in shock from being moved, they weren’t any worse by evening or the next day.   Right after planting, we gave them water, and for a bonus, it rained that evening, dropping an inch or so of water onto the vineyard.

We’ll know better in a week, when we return to Afton, if they’ll make it.  But whether they live or die – and we fervently hope they live – it was a bit of an experiment, and another step on the road to learning how to manage a vineyard.  Hopefully, the great experiment won’t turn out to be the grand flop.

 


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Planting the Vineyard, Part I

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Bob Garsson

With the trellis posts finally in the ground, we were finally ready to plant.  And not a moment too soon.

When we arrived in Afton on Friday evening, March 30, we had 50 dormant vines waiting for us: 25 Petit Manseng from Vintage Nurseries in Wasco, California, and 25 Viognier from Sunridge Nurseries, Bakersfield, California.  The largest number of vines we had ever planted before was seven, and we weren’t sure how long it would take to get

Here's the Petit Manseng vines still soaking in water just before planting

these vines in the ground, or even if we’d be able to get it done by the end of the weekend.  But we had another 100 vines set to arrive the following weekend, which meant we didn’t have much of a choice.  We decided to plant the Petit Manseng first, and prepared them by putting them in a bucket of water to soak overnight.

In the morning, we inspected the vines to see if they looked healthy.  This was kind of like the time in high school when my car wouldn’t start as I was taking my date home.  I opened the hood, looked inside as though I knew what I was doing, and just prayed it would start when I got back in the car.  It did start up, but not because of anything I had done.  I had just been putting on a good show.

Inspecting dormant vines by sight is kind of like that.  A dormant vine

Here's what a dormant vine looks like - A stick with roots at the bottom

looks like a small stick with a tangle of thin roots growing out of the bottom.   You can bend them a bit to make sure the graft union doesn’t snap, but I’m pretty sure the dead ones look about the same as the live ones.  So all of the intense squinting I did as I eyeballed the vines probably didn’t amount to much more than a good show.

However, on the advice of one of the the viticulture experts we follow most closely, WineMaker magazine columnist Wes Hagen of Clos Pepe Vineyards, we took the additional step of cutting one in half to make sure there was green tissue inside and no dark spots that might indicate disease.  It was hard to give up what amounted to fully four percent of the Petit Manseng, especially knowing that there was a strong likelihood that another one or two vines would probably die in the first year.  Still, it seemed best to know that the vines had survived the trip from California and the day or more wait on the porch. (No tracking information, so it was hard to know when they had actually arrived.)

Here I am digging one more hole for the vines

The vine looked nice and green inside, with no sign of disease, so bright and early Saturday morning we carried our fully soaked vines down the hill from the house to the vineyard, along with shovels, four-foot bamboo stakes and a specially-marked small spade that could be used to move earth around and also measure up to 12 inches.   The tool was very useful, especially in the early stages of planting, when we were at our most anxiety-ridden state of nervous obsession.  Part of me recognized that vines have been growing since the beginning of recorded history, and doing quite nicely with much less care than we were going to give them.  But another part of me was sure we were going to kill every single vine, leaving us with empty trellises for the neighbors to talk about while on their morning walks.

But we did worry obsessively over those first vines as they went into the ground.  We were aiming to plant them at a depth that would leave the graft union — the little bulge where the scion of the vine varietal is joined with the rootstock — four inches above ground.

We had a couple of reasons for going with four inches, which I

And here's the Vineyard Goddess planting a vine in one of those holes I dug!

sometimes referred to as “about four inches,” and other times as “three to four inches,” and every now and then as “four or more inches,”  depending upon my degree of confidence in our decision about the planting depth.

First, the ground had been ripped to a depth of about three feet.  The ripping is intended to give the roots an easier path down in their search for water, which is a good thing.  However, since the ground has been softened, it’s possible for the vines to sink as they settle in, and of course it’s always possible for soil to build up around them over time.  A little settling is fine, but if the scion reaches ground level, the vines will develop their own roots, separate from the grafted rootstock.  Those new roots, unfortunately, are not resistant to phylloxera, the root

Here I am resting -- where the heck did we put the beer?

louse that destroyed most of Europe’s vineyards in the 19th century.  That disaster, of course, is what gave rise to the practice of grafting European vines onto American rootstock in the first place.

So, why not put the graft union five inches above ground, or even six, just to be sure?  Wes Hagen and others recommend four to six inches, but in the first few years, we’ll be mounding dirt over the graft unions after the growing season to protect them from winter freezes, and the amount of dirt needed to form a mound grows almost exponentially as the height of the hill increases.  And trust me, digging dirt for the mounds is almost as much work as digging the holes.

In any event, we settled on four inches, and decided that if we ended up with only three inches through faulty measurement, that would be okay, as would five inches.  And I have to say, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on this issue.  Our classes, the books we’ve read, and even the instructions that came with the vines, all varied in their recommendations, with some saying two to four inches, others urging four to six, and still  others falling somewhere in between.

We agreed on a division of labor, in which I would dig the holes and my wife, the Vineyard Goddess, would measure and plant the vines.  It seemed perfect, and we thought we’d be done by noon.  But nothing ever goes thatsmoothly.  In our quest for perfection — okay, our nagging concern that we were about to destroy the vineyard — we decided to spend some time pondering which of the two bumps we observed

Here's a vine just after planting -- note the graft union near the top.

toward the top of the dormant vine was actually the graft union.  Looking at the nearby pic of a planted vine, it seems obvious now, but we decided to spend part of the morning looking at pictures of dormant grafted vines and worrying.

Once we got started, our division of labor worked just fine.  I dug the holes, the Vineyard Goddess filled them with water and then planted the vines once the water had drained.  It was probably the most sensible division of labor possible.  I did the rough work, digging holes that looked about right, and she did the precision piece, measuring their depth and then adding or subtracting soil until they

Phoenix the Vineyard Dog stands guard over a vine

were perfect.    She then trimmed an inch or so off the bottom of the roots, and pruned away any side roots.  Then, once the water had drained, she planted the vine, spreading the roots out at the bottom of the hole and pushing soil back in to fill the hole.

It was quite a successful day.  We got all 25 vines in the ground, and I got a head start on digging holes for the 25 Viognier that we would plant the next day.

I’ll talk a bit about the Viognier and the two red varietals we planted a week after that in a later post, but first I’ll acknowledge what I’m sure is

Glory, the Vineyard Dog in Training, helps the Vineyard Goddess plant a vine

obvious from the dates I cited at the top of this article — I’ve fallen woefully behind on updating ProjectSunlight over the past three weeks.

There’s a reason for that, and it has a lot to do with the subject matter.  It turns out that planting 50 vines by hand is a lot of work, and by the end of the weekend, I had just enough energy left to drive home to Fairfax, and get ready for work the next day.  And no, that weekend’s work didn’t just make me stronger for the next weekend.  The next 100 vines were at least twice as hard as the first 50, and probably more.  I spent the next week at work wondering exactly how

With 50 vines planted, Glory, the Vineyard Dog in Training, sleeps.

much ibuprofen it would take to make the muscle aches go away, and not quite finding the energy to write.

Someone told me once that lots of people think they want a vineyard, but after spending a day working in one, they realize that what they really want is a wine cellar.  I want both, but after planting 150 vines over two weekends, I do have a much greater appreciation for why some choose the wine cellar.

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An Hour of Frost

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Bob Garsson

Well, it doesn’t take much.  The forecast called for temperatures in my part of Fairfax County to dip below freezing for less than two hours, but that was enough to do some damage.   At least one of the vines appears to have sailed through the night with flying colors, but the others experienced at least some degree of frost damage.  As noted in my

Some damage on this vine - it's hard to see in this picture, but compare the shriveled leaves on the right with the green, healthy ones on the left side.

previous post, this is a critical time of the year for vines.  Late frost is a threat in any year, but the early bud break this spring left vines everywhere in the state exposed to the threat of frost in the weeks ahead.

As WineMaker magazine noted, late frost is a danger “because the first green growth produced on a new grapevine shoot is two or three basal leaves, immediately followed by the embryonic flower clusters that will become this year’s crop. So, if frost strikes, it can greatly reduce or even wipe out the whole vintage.”

For my vines in Fairfax, I believe the danger is even more acute because they are still small and the buds are so close to the ground, where the temperature is coldest.  We’re still new at this, and it’s possible we pruned them back too far over the winter. For the vines we plant this spring, we’ll definitely be focused on strategies for dealing with late frost, and I’ll talk about some of them in an upcoming post.

This Cab Franc vine did okay - all of the leaves look healthy.

Of course, one of the most important considerations in dealing with frost is site selection, and we’ve already cast that particular die.  The Fairfax vineyard is challenged on at least two counts.  It’s at a low elevation, and it’s on flat ground, so the cold air has no place to go.  In Nelson County, where we have some vines planted and are preparing to plant another 150, the elevation is higher, around 750 feet, but not high enough to put us in the atmospheric sweet spot that probably runs from about 800 to 1,600 feet above sea level.  On the other hand, the land is sloped, so the heavier cold air should flow down hill and off the vineyard.  We’ll see.

But no matter how well you plan, you may still find yourself dealing with late frost.  I suspect most commercial vineyards in the state were monitoring the vines throughout the night and taking steps to mitigate the frost threat.  Larger vineyards have a number of tools they can bring to bear, including wind machines, heaters, and helicopters.  Many vineyards gather the wood pruned from the vines over the winter and leave it at the end of the rows to burn on nights where frost threatens.

This year, we didn’t have a lot of choices beyond praying and hoping.  However, the Fairfax vineyard is only experimental;  I’m not expecting to ever make wine from those grapes, although it would be a definite bonus if I do.  But for the vines we are putting in the ground this Spring, we’ll probably have some sleepless spring nights in our future.

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The Perils of an Early Spring

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Bob Garsson

We arrived home Sunday afternoon to find that the vines in our Fairfax vineyard were blooming in a magnificent way.  I had pruned them during the winter, when they were still dormant, and have been wondering ever since if I had cut cut them back too severely.  When I saw them on Sunday, though, I felt vindicated. Yes!  Yes ! They would be up to the first wire (30 ” – or maybe 36″, I actually haven’t put the trellis in yet) in no time flat, I assumed.

The Fairfax vineyard is a bit overrun with weeds right now, but you can see the leaves on this vine if you look closely.

I couldn’t have been happier.  Until I showed the vines to my wife, the Vineyard Goddess.

“Well, that’s good and bad,” she said.  Good, of course, because the vines looked so healthy and productive.  But mostly bad, because, it’s still March and we could have some frost ahead of us.  The bud break I observed on my vines had come very early in the season.  And when she glanced over my shoulder at this post, she added another rule of thumb for vineyard management: “March will always be too early for bud break.”

And of course she was right.  (She’s pretty much always right.  Thank God she’s watching over our vineyard.)  This evening, I found an email alert from Tony Wolf, the Virginia Tech viticulture specialist, and probably the state’s foremost expert on all things viticultural,  warning of the likelihood of freezing temperature overnight.  According to NOAA‘s web site, temperatures will drop to about 31 degrees tonight in Afton, the site of our Nelson County vineyard, and 30 degrees in Fairfax, where the aforementioned vines are Continue reading →

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Building the Trellis, Part I

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Bob Garsson

Here's how the vineyard looked last weekend, March 17. The posts are in the ground, the rows have been ripped, and it's beginning to look like a real vineyard! You can see our neighbors, the Alpacas, on the hill, top left.

How we built the trellis

Well, I have to be honest, I didn’t exactly build it myself.  Much as I wanted to install the posts with my own hands, I ended up short on time with the planting season upon us.  We needed to get the vines in the ground, pronto.

I’d spent much of the winter, between viticulture classes, my job and all of the work that goes into maintaining two separate properties, thinking about how to handle the trellis.  There were moments when it seemed simple enough — eight foot posts put 24 to 30 inches into the ground, plus some kind of end-post system, which would be only slightly more complicated.  And then, there were times when I wondered if I was up to the job.

Here’s a shot of one of the rows, showing the ripped soil.

As part of the planning, I did some research on what kind of equipment I’d need to buy or rent.   A lot of the literature suggests that the best way to put posts into the ground is to pound them in, but the equipment involved would have made that impractical for me to do on my own.  The easiest way to get the posts in is to drill the holes with an auger.

So, I briefly considered the idea of a hand-held power auger, which was the least expensive approach, or an auger for my tractor.  I spent a lot of time visualizing the process, and considering whether it would be more cost-effective to do it myself or hire someone to do the work.  I was pretty confident I could get the line posts in without a problem, but I spent a lot more time worrying about the end posts, which are more complicated.  At some point, I began waking up at 4 a.m. to worry about how much work needed to be done and wonder if the vines we had ordered were destined to just, uh, rot on the vine?  No, bad metaphor.  Go to seed?  mmmm…. no, that doesn’t work either.  Wither and die?  Well, something like that.

Eventually, we passed the point where I could reasonably expect that it would be Continue reading →

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Dormant Winter Pruning — and other Vineyard Considerations

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Bob Garsson

After a long winter that sometimes seemed like it would never end, spring planting is just around the corner.  And despite all the time we had to prepare for the new season, we are now feeling not quite as ready as we’d like to be.

We’ve ordered 150 vines –50 Petit Verdot, 50 Cab Franc, 25 Viognier and 25 Petit Manseng – and lately I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night wondering if we’ll have everything in place in time to plant.  I’m still worried, but we’ve made enough progress lately, especially this weekend, that I’m feeling a bit better about the whole enterprise.

The Nelson County Vineyard - complete except for the trellising, vines and deer fence!

Our biggest concern is the trellis.  If you’ve followed our progress through this blog, you’ll note that I didn’t worry about that last Spring when we planted 14 vines, split between our Fairfax and Nelson county properties, but that was different on a couple of counts.  First, those vines were more for our education than for the eventual production of wine.  And we’ve learned a lot from taking care of those vines.  Wine in two years would be a bonus, but it wasn’t the goal when we planted them.  The second reason I didn’t obsess over the trellis is that I didn’t expect those vines to reach the height of the first wire in that initial year.  And since there are so few Continue reading →

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Every Grape is Different — Notes from a Vineyard Conference

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Bob Garsson

 The Virginia Vineyards Association brings together commercial grape growers, hobbyists and others with an interest in viticulture, and its efforts to promote cooperation and the exchange of information  is one of the reasons that the Commonwealth’s wine gets better every year.  I believe, and I think most of the growers who participated in the association’s technical meeting in Charlottesville last week would agree, that the reputation of Virginia wine is influenced by every bottle that’s sold.  If someone has a bad experience the first time they taste a Virginia wine, they may never try another.  So all of us have a vested interest in doing what we can to help each other make the best wine possible. 

Seven glasses ready for tasting. The bottle of “SanTasti” is a palate cleanser.

  Another reason for the success of the Virginia wine industry is the work that’s being done at Virginia Tech by folks like Tony Wolf, Bruce Zoecklein, and Mizuho Nita, all of whom played major roles at the meeting.  Tony Wolf’s book, Wine Grape Production Guide for Eastern North America, has become our bible as we move toward planting a small hobby vineyard, and Mizuho Nita’s blog is the indispensible guide to grape disease management.  

  However, this was my first encounter with Dr. Zoecklein, and I’m hopeful now that it won’t be my last.  Dr. Zoecklein has written the book (actually, at least four books and too many articles to count) on wine chemistry, and he manages to make the chemistry both accessible and practical for people like me.  And since this was a class on “Sensory Evaluation for Grape Growers,” he taught the class through the tastes and aromas of seven separate wines, which we tasted blind throughout the class. Continue reading →

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Five Vintages of Cab Franc at Gadino Cellars

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Bob Garsson

 

Gadino Cellars, founded by Bill Gadino and his wife, Aleta Saccuta Gadino, is a Virginia winery with an Italian flavor. The Nebbiola grapes grow alongside the Cab Franc and Viognier, two of Virginia's signature grapes.

   As I’ve said before, I believe that Cabernet Franc is Virginia’s signature red grape, even if Petit Verdot iscoming on strong.  It is more cold-hardy than Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon, and it ripens earlier.  That’s important in Virginia, which can be prone to early frost, Fall rains, and the occasional harsh winter.  And Cab Franc is a wonderful grape on its own.  It has softer tannins than Cab Sauv, and while it might not be quite as age-worthy, wines today are being made (and

Five Vintages of Cab Franc waiting to be poured, along with a mystery wine, hidden in brown bags for blind tasting

purchased) for early drinking, not for years in the cellar.  Cab Franc will age, of course, but it is also more accessible when young than the more tannic reds.  And Cab Franc can be used on its own or as a blend to make wines with great complexity, as the great St. Emilion blend, Cheval Blanc, demonstrates. 

 Cab Frank is particularly important to my wife, the Vineyard Goddess, and me, because it’s one of three grapes we will be planting this Spring, the other two being Petit Verdot and Viognier.  (We had hoped to plant Petit Manseng as well, but couldn’t find the certified vines we wanted.)

 So, I was thrilled to have the opportunity Saturday to participate in a vertical tasting of Cab Francs at Gadino Cellars in Washington, VA (Rappahannock County).  We tasted wines from 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, plus a barrel sample of the 2011.  The Gadinos threw in a mystery wine, which we tasted blind.  More on the mystery wine later. Continue reading →

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The Year of the Sorting Table

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Bob Garsson

Following up on my last blog, which concerned Cab Franc, Tim Mondavi, and the 2011 vintage in Virginia, among other things, I just read Emily Pelton’s article on the 2011 harvest in Grape Press, the publication of the Virginia Vineyards Association, and I am somewhat more hopeful about this vintage.

First, some introductions.  Emily Pelton is the winemaker extraordinaire at her family’s

Emily Pelton and "3" wine
Emily Pelton of Veritas Vineyards (showing off bottles of “3″ wine)

vineyard in Nelson County, Veritas Vineyard and Winery.  And the Virginia Vineyards Association is the indispensable organization for anyone in the Commonwealth  interested in viticulture and winemaking.  The November issue of the Grape Press was one of the best I’ve read.  In fact, I think I read every word, from beginning to end, and it was all good.

In any event, I spent part of my last post lamenting the difficult weather conditions, particularly the abundant rain that created all kinds of problems in the vineyard.  One of the difficult decisions that winemakers and vineyard managers make as harvest approaches is how willinging they are to gamble on the weather.  If rain is in the forecast, do you hold out a little longer, hoping the grapes will achieve the perfect balance of sugar and acidity, or do you pick early, sacrificing a bit of brix for the certainty that you will at least have a harvest? Continue reading →

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