Category: Viticulture
Bringing in the Grapes – Part II
Since we don’t have grapes of our own to harvest this year, we did the next best thing, and took a class at Piedmont Virginia Community College on “Harvesting and Basic Analysis of the Must,” taught by the incomparable Gabriele Rausse.
- Each grape is precious – I don’t want to send bad fruit to the crush pad, but I don’t want to waste good fruit either.
After a brief classroom lecture, we moved on to Blenheim Vineyards, where we helped (help being a relative term) pick one section of Viognier grapes. I went into this assuming that picking grapes might be the one thing about viticulture that would be so straightforward, so foolproof – SO SIMPLE! – that we could just do it, without staring at the vines, paralyzed with fear, before asking for help.
Well, no such luck.
- Malbec grapes, ready to be loaded onto the sorting table
For this particular section of the vineyard, Blenheim was “sorting in the vineyard,” which is to say, we were dropping grapes that had succumbed to disease or sour rot, or were otherwise not suitable for pressing. Most often, you bring the grapes in and sort at the crushpad, separating out the fruit that doesn’t belong in the must, and getting rid of MOG – matter other than grapes. (You’d be surprised at how many spiders make their way to the crushpad. )
This has been an exceptionally difficult year for Virginia vineyards, and Blenheim didn’t want to take a chance on letting bad fruit infect the good back at the winery. So, in addition to sorting at the crushpad, Blenheim left bad fruit on the ground in the vineyard. Continue Reading–>
Bringing in the Grapes – Part I
It’s getting on toward the end of September, and the wine grape harvest is in full swing. Most vineyards have harvested most of their white grapes, which ripen early, and are watching their reds very closely, with one eye on the grapes and the other on the weather. Agriculture is an unpredictable
- An unguarded moment picking grapes at Blenheim Vineyards — mostly I had my eyes on my work while using pruning shears to snip clusters of grapes.
business, and there are a lot of tough decisions to be made, especially in a growing season that has featured too much rain at the wrong times. (Thank you, Irene.) Sometimes it comes down to a compromise – do I pick the grapes now, when they’re not quite perfect, or wait and hope that weather doesn’t get in the way and cost me the entire harvest? It’s an especially troublesome set of decisions now, in the midst of the 2011 harvest, for several reasons.
For one, the wet conditions are a breeding ground for disease, particularly Downy Mildew and Botrytis, and spraying isn’t always possible in these last weeks. That’s a problem for this year, if you’re trying to avoid issues such as sour rot, and it’s a problem for next year as well. Mizuho Nita, a grape pathologist at Virginia Tech, notes that while the berries (grapes) should be resistant to Downy Mildew, vineyard managers need to be concerned about the effect of disease on the canopy.
“Vines need healthy leaf areas for accumulation of carbohydrate into the main trunk in order to survive the winter,” he said in a recent blog post.
In addition, the grapes swell with water after a rain, which dilutes the wine that would be made from them. Brix levels (a measure of the sugar and potential alcohol) drop after a big rain, and the skins may crack, which is a cause of sour rot. Moreover, the skins, which provide color and tannin to reds, may be too thin to do their job well.
“Mother Nature certainly isn’t doing us any favors with all of this rain and the never-ending dreary days,” says Sharon Roeder, winemaker at Barrel Oak Winery (BOW, for the dog-lovers among you – and who isn’t a dog lover!).
Despite the weather, Sharon says she’s still pleased with what she’s seeing from the harvest – at BOW, they’ve already brought in Seyval Blanc, Chardonnay, and Vidal Blanc – but the year will be challenging for winemakers, she says.
“The 2011 vintage won’t be a piece of cake, and the winemakers are definitely going to have to pay attention,” she adds. “But those who put their experience to use and take advantage of the resources available to us certainly have an opportunity to craft some excellent wines this year.”
At DuCard Vineyards, where I’ve been learning about vineyard management through a series of hands-on classes, owner and winemaker Scott Elliff has a similar perspective. He’s picked the Viognier, and is grateful to have those grapes in the barn. Some vineyards, he noted, were delayed by rain, and by the time crews arrived to pick, the crop was lost.
Reds are a different story. With Cab Franc and Petit Verdot, Scott is holding out. “We are seeking to maximize ripeness and maturity and not ‘just’ get to acceptable Brix levels,” he said.
We were pretty ruthless in deciding which grapes to keep, but it was worth it. They could not be more beautiful. Can't wait to go back to Blenheim next year and taste the wine.
However, “it’s a crapshoot,” he added Friday, especially after looking at the forecast that morning. He wants to bring the grapes in when they’re as close to perfect as possible – and that means more than the right balance of sugar and acidity.
Julien Durantie, DuCard’s vineyard manager, said that even though the numbers were decent, the Cab Franc grapes still have green seeds. The green color means the seeds aren’t fully mature, which imparts a bitterness to the wine.
And of course, there’s so much more to the decision about when to harvest. You can measure the Brix with a refractometer, measure the pH and look at the seeds. But Brix is just a measure of sugar and potential alcohol, and you can add sugar to the fermenting wine to correct for low Brix. A good winemaker also brings his or her experience to bear on the decision about when to harvest, and of course, they never really have full control.
It’s harvest at its best, Julien says – “A wonderful nightmare.”
Planning for the Spring Planting
Well, we still haven’t come to terms on the vines, but we’re confident we’ll get there, so we’re turning part of our attention to the work necessary to prepare the vineyard for planting. And believe me, there’s lots to do.
Behind me, a view of the site of the future Nelson County vineyard.
First, the decisions. I say first, because the thinking part comes before the physical labor part. And I’ve learned just enough about vineyard management to know that the thinking part is going to be a lot easier than the physical labor part of this enterprise.
But that’s not to say that the thinking part is easy. Nope, not on your life, Bud. There’s a number of decisions to be made. Such as, which way to orient the rows.
The consensus in the viticultural world appears to be that rows should run as close to north to south as possible, so that the sun falls full force on the eastern side of the canopy in the morning and the western side in the afternoon. There are secondary concerns as well. For example, if your vineyard is on a significant slope, the rows should run perpendicular to the slope, which minimizes erosion. Or, if a north-south rows would be too short to be practical – which is to say, if your vineyard is some kind of long, very narrow rectangle – you can orient in a different direction.
However, secondary considerations always lose to the prime directive, which is that rows should run north to south.
In our case, we are somewhat handicapped because the trees surrounding our hobby vineyard limit sun in the morning. Morning is a critical time. Moisture accumulates during the night, and it’s important that the canopy dry as quickly as possible in the morning. That’s why an eastern aspect – a slope, or even flat land, that opens to the east – is so desirable.
Other forces of nature, wind in particular, also dry out vines, but while the sun is reliable in that it appears every morning, wind can’t be counted on. On the mornings that we’ve woken to a steady breeze, we’ve noticed that everything dries quickly. (We probably noticed that years and years ago, but since it didn’t matter to us until now, we didn’t take much note of it.) So, despite the generally untrustworthy nature of wind, we are now trying to figure out if it tends to blow in a particular direction in our little valley. If so, then perhaps it would pay to forget the conventional wisdom and go with a different approach.
There’s more, of course. I’ll be continuing this discussion for some time to come. Thank God we’re still on the thinking part.
In Search of a Few Good Vines
Now that we know what kinds of grapes we want to grow, it’s time to get down to the serious business of ordering vines and getting ready for spring planting. (Actually, this whole process has been serious business, but since the selection of grape varieties mostly involved visiting wineries and tasting wine, this part of the effort is serious in a somewhat different way.)
We began with some research on what clones have done well in Virginia. When you order vitis vinifera wines (which encompasses the European-style grapes most people are most familiar with, from Chardonnay to Cabernet Sauvignon), you’re making two decisions for each variety – the type of rootstock to use and the clone that will be grafted onto it. At a minimum, it’s important that rootstocks be resistant to such pests as phylloxera, the root louse that all but destroyed European vineyards in the 19thcentury, and nematodes, but we’re also looking for roots that will inhibit excessive growth, withstand cold winters, and work well in our soil, which is clay and loam. Long story short, we’ve pretty much decided to go with a root stock known as 101-14, the same root stock on the Cab Franc vines we’ve already planted in both the Fairfax and Nelson County vineyards.
Clones are more interesting, and they took a bit more time to figure out. Keep in mind that grape vines reproduce asexually. Cuttings from a Cab Franc are used to produce more Cab Franc
Here's a Cab Franc vine in the Fairfax vineyard (with Phoenix the Vineyard Dog standing guard) The clone is FPS 4, grafted onto 101-14 rootstock. The picture was shot a few months after planting.
vines, and it is presumed that the clone will exhibit the same qualities and characteristics as the vine it was taken from. But variations occur, and if a new vine exhibits differences that are deemed to be desirable, it may be characterized as a new clone and propagated more widely. So there isn’t just a single Viognier or a lone Cab Franc. There are a number of different Cab Francs, each classified as a separate clone, and each exhibiting different qualities, not just in the way they grow, but in the quality of the wine they produce.
So the choice of clones was very important to us. We relied heavily on Tony Wolf’s indispensible book,Wine Grape Production in Eastern North America, and came up with the following oddly-named clones (actually, all clones are oddly named; they sound a bit like the parts in an erector set) : For Cab Franc: ENTAV 214, 327, or 623 (whichever one we can get); for Petit Manseng: ENTAV 573; Petit Verdot, ENTAV 400, and Viognier: ENTAV 642. I mentioned Merlot in my last post, but we’ve pretty much decided that’s a clone too far for this year.
You can see that the clones we are most interested in all have the word ENTAV in their name. ENTAV (which stands for, Etablissement National Technique pour l’Amelioration de la Viticulture, or National Educational Association for Viticultural Improvement) are grapes of French origin, and sold in the United States through licensed nurseries. (By contrast, the clones we purchased early this year, referenced in the caption above, are FPS, which stands for Foundation Plant Services, the UC-Davis department that produces, tests, maintains and distributes premium foundation-level virus & disease-tested plant materials for use by California nurseries.)
We called one of the nurseries a few days ago, assuming that when we told them we planned to order a whopping 125 vines that they would fall all over themselves to help us, perhaps even offering to fly us out to California to get a look at the nursery. (You know I’m kidding, right? I would guess that their average order is measured in multiples of a thousand vines.) Our actual assumption is that we’d be able to get someone on the phone who could talk to us for a couple of minutes and then take our order and credit card number.
The nursery was Sunridge, which seems to be one of the very best in California, and the woman who worked with us could not have been friendlier or more helpful. Unfortunately, they didn’t have most of what we wanted. It turns out that they didn’t develop most of what we wanted “on spec” this year.
“On spec” seems to mean roughly the same thing in the grape vine nursery business as it does in the housing industry, where developers either build to order for a buyer who puts money down in advance, or build on spec in the hopes that buyers will show up with cash in hand. Whatever the case, they had the Viognier clones, but nothing else among our favorites.
Okay, that was a surprise. We had just assumed that everything on the web site would be immediately available and that all we had to do was call and ask for what we wanted. Now we are wondering if we will have to settle for clones that aren’t exactly what we want or wait another year to get clones of our dreams. Given that it takes a minimum of three years before the vines begin producing grapes, and a year or more after that before the wine is ready to drink, you only have so many chances in a single lifetime to get it right. And in our case, we only have so much land to devote to this enterprise. Putting off the planting for a year is not an option.
My wife, the Vineyard Goddess, sprang into action, and promptly identified a number of nurseries that distribute the varieties of grapes that we’re looking for. Great news! The bad news, however, was that only a handful sold the ENTAV clones we’re looking for.
We knew that there are only a limited number of ENTAV-approved nurseries in the United States, but we didn’t know how limited that number was. It turns out that only four nurseries in the U.S. are licensed to sell ENTAV clones, and two of them appear to have merged. Of the remaining two, one doesn’t have a web site, which is making it difficult to contact them, and the fourth has been a bit slow in getting back to us.
We think there might be other options, including Mercier California. According to the National Grape Registry, which is hosted by UC-Davis, Mercier has a presence in California. However, Mercier’s web site is tout en francias, and we are wondering if their ENTAV vines are shipped from France. Not that I care where they are shipped from. However, I do care about shipping costs. A friend who spent most of his life working vineyards in Bordeaux highly recommended Mercier, so we are hopeful that this is a viable option.
Okay, apparently purchasing vines isn’t as simple as logging into Amazon and selecting one-day shipping. But most of the things in life that are worthwhile require some extra work. And if anything warrants extra labor, it’s good wine. We’ll keep at it until we get it right. And with luck, we’ll be ordering those vines next week!
Getting Ready for the Spring Planting
We’ve learned a lot about viticulture (so much so that if we were in the army, the body of knowledge we’ve accumulated would fall under the heading of “knowing just enough to get us killed”), and so we’re feeling like we want to plant a larger vineyard this Spring. “Larger” is a relative term, of course; given that we’re starting with a vineyard of seven vines, it would be hard to go smaller. We’re thinking of something between 100 and 200 vines.
- Our Nelson County vines are feeling lonely – hopefully this Spring we’ll give them some company.
Most people in the business, even most backyard vintners, would regard that as a small undertaking, but it’s large for us, especially since we won’t be living close to this vineyard for at least the next few years. Everything we plant has to be maintained, and that includes spraying very soon (within 24 hours) after any rainfall that drops more than three-quarters of an inch of water onto the vines. So, while the number of vines we’re considering is very small by most standards, it’s sizeable by the criteria most relevant to us.
However, it makes the question of what grapes to plant – and how many different types of grapes to plant – much more complicated.
In a small vineyard like ours, it’s probably best to plant relatively few types of grapes, since it’s easier to process 50 gallons of one type of wine that 25 gallons each of two varieties. Well, we’re going for fun, not efficiency, so we’re thinking of four or five, all in the Vitis vinifera family of European-style grapes. There are others, such as Norton, a Virginia original, that are much easier to grow (less spraying, less worry all around), and many Virginia wineries say that Norton is their most popular grape. But again, we intend for this to be a labor of love, so while we’re not going to disregard entirely issues of suitability, we’ve decided to grow varietals that we love.
First off, we want a white, and Viognier has been named Virginia’s signature grape by the Virginia Wine Board. We wouldn’t agree that Viognier is the best grape, period, for Virginia, but among whites, we do think a Virginia Viognier is something quite special. Chardonnay and other whites do well here, but I think Viognier grown in Virginia has the potential to be world class. So, Viognier makes the cut – three (or maybe four) to go.
Next, we’d like to have some kind of desert wine, and after drinking a bottle of Petit Manseng from Veritas Vineyards over the weekend, we decided to add that one as well to the shopping list. Two down, now on to the reds.
We like Bordeaux-style blends, so we want to choose from among the great grapes of Bordeaux: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cab Franc and Petit Verdot. (I’m not counting Malbec, which I doubt will do well on our property.) We’ve had all four from Virginia wineries, so we know they’re at least realistic options.
Almost everyone agrees that Cab Franc does well in Virginia, and we’ve had good Cab Francs from many wineries. In addition, the dozen Cab Franc vines that we planted in our two separate “vineyards” seem to be doing quite well, despite the late planting. So Cab Franc seems like an easy choice. But the results we’ve observed from Cab Sauv and Merlot are a bit spottier.
We’ve had very good Merlots from King Family Vineyards, among other wineries, and we tasted a lovely Merlot at Barboursville Vineyards Saturday, full of fruit, and very drinkable. I’ve also had a few Cabs from Virginia wineries that I’ve enjoyed, including one at Barboursville last weekend, but on the whole, I have to say that I haven’t loved Virginia Cabs as much as I would have liked. It would be nice to have one of the two for Bordeaux blends, and while my heart is always with Cab Sauv, my head tells me that Merlot is the better choice for us. This is a tough one.
That brings me to Petit Verdot. Two years ago, I had never tasted Petit Verdot as a varietal, and I can recall being surprised the first time it was offered in a tasting room. I remember enjoying it, but thinking of it as a bit of a novelty. I had grown up believing that Petit Verdot was a blending grape that was used in small amounts to correct acidity in Bordeaux blends.
A few weeks ago, when we decided to give Petit Verdot serious consideration for our vineyard, we visited a couple of wineries that bottled this grape as a varietal. Both were sold out, which we thought was a good indicator of what wine-drinkers think of Virginia Petit Verdot.
Phoenix, the Vineyard Dog, inspecting BOW's tank room. Here he is walking away from a tank after discovering that it was empty.
Our major concerns at this point were all practical. Petit Verdot is a late-ripening grape, at least as late as Cab Sauv, which we think might be hard to grow, and that concerned us. On the way home from Nelson County Thursday, we stopped at Barrel Oak Winery (BOW), which is not only dog friendly (Phoenix the Vineyard Dog was traveling with us), but we thought it featured a Petit Verdot (PV for the rest of this post).
Alas, BOW was also sold out of PV. However, we lucked out. Sharon Roeder, who owns BOW along with husband Brian, and serves as its winemaker, took us on a tour of the winery, and offered a barrel sample of the 2010 PV.
It’s not so easy to tell how a wine will develop as it continues to age in the barrel, and then ages some more in the bottle. But I was just blown away by this Petit Verdot. It’s a big, bold, exuberant wine that is just full of fruit. I would have loved to have poured a bottle and taken it home. However, this wine has a ways to go before it’s bottled sometime in the Spring of 2012. Before bottle aging starts, it will have spent 15 months in oak. Fortunately, BOWs 2009 PV will be released in a couple of months. I expect to be first in line.
So, that tasting eliminated by doubts about growing Petit Verdot. Maybe it’s more difficult than other grapes, but the results are surely worth it. And while I agree that Viognier is Virginia’s signature white grape, I’m wondering if Petit Verdot will join Cab Frank as the Commonwealth’s (by my reckoning) signature red.
So, we’re done to Viognier, Petit Manseng, Cab Frank, Petit Verdot, and maybe Merlot. Now the real challenges begin. How much of the total vineyard to plant next Spring? How many of each varietal? And which nursery to buy the vines from? Tough questions. Probably best to ponder them over a glass of wine. Maybe a Virginia Viognier.
Introducing the Vines, Part II – Meet the Nelsons
It’s long past time to introduce the Nelson County vines, but before I start, let me once again acknowledge that it’s a bit of a stretch to refer to seven vines as a vineyard. But hey, it’s a stretch I’m willing to make. One is a vine, two or more is a vineyard, right?
- “Nelson Mandela,” the tallest, noblest of our Cab Franc vines, named for one of the truly great figures of the 20th century.
The Nelson County property is the site for the real vineyard we plan to put in, and the seven vines we’ve planted fall into the category of experimental. As my wife, the Vineyard Goddess, puts it, we want to make our mistakes on these vines, so that we’ll know what we’re doing when we plant the main vineyard.
The vineyard itself is a small plot, surrounded by a deer fence, with five Cab Franc vines and two Mammolo Toscanos. The Cab Franc were purchased from Double A Vineyards, a nursery in New York state. They were ordered for delivery in the middle of April, a bit late in the season, but it took me a little time to get my arms around the idea that I could actually get everything done in time to plant vines this year. We ordered 12 in all, and the other seven were planted at our Fairfax property, where I thought I could keep a close eye on them. Continue Reading–>
Outsmarting Birds and other Vineyard Predators
The grapes at DuCard Vineyards are starting to ripen nicely, which means that pretty much every creature that walks, flies or crawls is out to feast on them.
DuCard Vineyards in mid-August. The Cab Franc grapes are looking beautiful. Should be another great vintage for DuCard
There’s an old saying that goes something like this: when the deer begin eating the grapes, the Brix (a measure of the sugar level) is 20, when the birds begin feeding, it’s 22, and when the bees go after grapes, it’s time to harvest. (If anyone has a more accurate take on that little bit of country wisdom, please post a comment!)
That aphorism probably ascribes a level of precision to nature that can’t be verified with scientific instruments, but it does give you an idea of what the grape farmer is up against. After a growing season in which the vines are threatened by any one of a dozen pests or diseases, not to mention the vagaries of weather, Mother Nature presents a whole new set of challenges just as the grapes are reaching perfection.
Vineyard balloons: If you're a bird thirsting for Viognier, it doesn't get any scarier than this.
Saturday’s vineyard management class at DuCard focused on a number of these problems, and some of the tried and true solutions that have been used by viticulturists for years. Some are high tech, like the box that transmits sounds of birds in distress throughout the vineyard, and others are decidedly low-tech: balloons and CDs hanging from trellises in spots where they’ll catch a bit of sunlight. All three seem to work pretty well.
Birds apparently have some early warning systems. They understand the vineyard is supposed to look a certain way, and when they see something out of the ordinary, they look for safer pastures, so to speak. The CDs catch a glint of sunlight, and are visible to the birds as they approach, sending off the signal
Any old song will do: Not sure if it matters which CDs we hang from the vines, they all seem to scare the birds.
that something is not quite right here, so move on, and be quick about it. The balloons accomplish the same thing. In other vineyards, I’ve seen foil streamers flying in the breeze, which has the same effect.
And the deer will be coming soon as well. DuCard is located in the midst of open country, some of the most beautiful country you’ll ever see, and so it’s home to more deer than any of us can count. The electric fence is going up this week, and between the fence, the balloons and the CDs, Scott thinks he has “about a 95 percent solution,” which I think is a nice compromise with nature.
While walking through the vineyard Saturday, I tasted a few Cab Franc and Viognier grapes, and was impressed by the sweetness. We’re getting toward the end of the period of veraison, the time in which the berries stop growing in size and begin ripening, turning color in the process. The Cab Franc gapes, for example, were about 80 percent there (by my own seat-of-the-pants measurement), with most of the grapes blue-black in color, and only a few still greenish. They’re looking magnificent, and the growing sugar level was evident on my tongue when I tasted the grapes.
As we move toward harvest, the sugar will continue to increase and acidity will drop. The seeds inside the grape will turn color from their current green to more of a brown, and will lose their bitterness. Soon, Scott Elliff, DuCard’s owner, and Julien Durantie, his vineyard manager, will begin testing the grapes regularly, taking advantage of both technology (checking the Brix with a refractometer), and the knowledge that comes from years of working in vineyards (looking at the seeds, chewing the skin to get an idea of the tannins, etc.)
The day of the harvest can’t be predicted this far in advance, and of course each of the four varieties of grapes Scott grows will ripen at different times. But at some point for each, everything will come together, and Scott will make the judgment that it’s time to get the grapes off the vine and onto the crush pad.
And then we can start dreaming about the wine.
Meet the Vines: Fairfax — The Magnificent Seven
Well, I thought it was time to start introducing everyone to the vines I’ve planted, starting with the Fairfax vineyard. As I’ve said in the past, seven vines hardly constitutes a vineyard, and yet it’s big enough to yield enough grapes for five gallons of wine — about 30 bottles — when I get my first real harvest in three or four years. Not too shabby.
Phoenix, the Vineyard Dog, resting behind Vine 6 (the Big Mama)
The vines in Fairfax are growing like Topsy, and I wonder sometimes if there’s too much vigor in this vineyard. Vines themselves are capable of amazing growth. They can grow higher than the trees in our yard, and we have really tall trees. But that’s not what we’re looking for. In these first few years, we want to funnel the energy of the vine into the development of the root system, and after that, into the grapes themselves. What we don’t want is for the vine itself to grow out of control, stealing vigor from the roots in the first years and the grapes thereafter.
The rootstock on these vines is of a type known as 101-14, which is a low vigor rootstock. And basically, I think we’re doing okay. We’ll see. But for now, let me introduce you to the Magnificent 7 (and believe me, they are magnificent!), one vine at a time. FYI, they are all Cab Franc.
First, here’s the back row, closest to the backyard fence (you can see a patch of Day Lilies, with a few unpulled weeds, on the other side of the fence). This row also has a rose bush between the two vines.
Vine 2
Vine 1
And here’s the middle row. The vines are all tied to faux bamboo poles. The large stake next to them is a leftover from the initial planting, before I had a fence up and was worried that the lawn service might mow them down without a few obstacles.
Vine 4
Vine 3
Finally, the third row, three vines strong. The middle vine is the giant of the group, nearly five feet tall, and the last is the runt of the litter. But I have every confidence that the little guy will produce great wine grapes someday, maybe the best in the vineyard.
Vine 7 (the runt)
Vine 5
Vine 6- The Big Mama
So there it is. The vineyard ain’t huge, but it has loads of personality! And here’s a couple of shots that illustrate the humble beginnings of this patch of vines.
And here's a wider shot. Note the wheelbarrow in the foreground, a sure sign that I'm about to get my hands dirty.
Only a few months ago, it sure didn't look much like a vineyard
The Agony of Dropping Fruit
A cluster of grapes that will never be wine.
This is only a guess, albeit a somewhat educated guess, but I suspect every vineyard worker has the same uneasy, guilty feeling the first time he drops fruit from a vine.
By dropping fruit, I mean walking through the vineyard, from one vine to the next, and cutting off perfectly good clusters of grapes and letting them fall to the ground. It seems wasteful, and when you see a cluster of nearly perfect grapes lying on the ground next to your feet, you feel like a butcher. But you have to remain focused and keep your eye on the prize.
“Think about the wine,” said Julien Durantie, the vineyard manager at DuCard Vineyards. Ah, yes, the wine. Don’t worry about the grapes on the ground that will soon rot and return to the soil to nurture future crops. Think ahead a year or more to the wine that will be made from the fruit that remains.
- Bob “The Butcher” ruthlessly hacking fruit.
The idea behind dropping fruit is simple: the vine has only so much energy, and by reducing the number of clusters, you end up with a more concentrated juice and much better, much more intense wine. In a sense, this is a continuation of the process we’ve been engaged in throughout the growing season. Early on, we thinned out the shoots, leaving behind a smaller number of shoots that we hoped would produce high-quality grapes. As we moved through the season, pulling leaves to open up the canopy, we continued to remove suckers, laterals, and extra shoots that would deprive the vine of its vigor.
Removing suckers and thinning shoots was one thing. Clipping off beautiful clusters of berries that were turning into wine grapes, was much harder. I tried to keep my mind focused on the wine.
- Another view of the carnage.
As was the case in many classes before, I found myself nearly paralyzed at the start, not quite remembering what I had been told, and staring at the vine, afraid to make the first cut. And so, I spent time separating out vines that had become tangled, pulling some laterals (which look like a small, separate leaf system), and considering whether to cut this clump or the next one. And finally, as always, I called Scott Eliff, the vineyard’s owner, or Julien, and begged for help.
We were working just at the onset of veraison, the time in which the berries change color. Here and there, we spotted a few cab franc grapes turning purple, but the vines we actually worked on were Viognier, Virginia’s signature white grape. (Actually, while the Virginia Wine Board has declared Viognier to be the Commonwealth’s Signature Grape, I prefer to think of it as the signature white. Cab Franc and Petit Verdot are my choices for reds.
- In Memorium: Honoring the fallen clusters.
In any event, a little bit of my heart lay on the ground with each cluster of grapes. And I was only the hired (well, volunteer) help. I can’t imagine how agonizing it is for the owner of the vineyard to drop fruit, knowing he or she is reducing the vineyard’s yield significantly with each clip of the pruning shears.
Fortunately, this is one kind of heartache that can be cured by opening and tasting a bottle of wine that has benefitted from the “Green Harvest” of dropping fruit. Wine is often said to be made in the vineyard, and the best is made by vineyards like DuCard that are willing to sacrifice quantity for quality.
Vineyard Diseases and How to Cure Them
It’s scary to think about how many predators are out there waiting to attack the average vineyard. Birds, bees, foxes, rabbits, deer – Even Bambi can’t be trusted! – and a host of insects, from the potato leafhopper to the Japanese Beetle, want nothing more than to devour the vines, from their leaves on down to the grapes themselves. And that isn’t counting the fungi.
- Black Rot – note the black border around the brown spot
Last weekend at Monticello, Gabriele Rausse taught a class on vineyard diseases that was as wonderful (Gabriele and Monticello) as it was depressing (birds, bees, deer – you get it). The predatory Bambis of the world can be controlled fairly easily with fences. Birds, which begin taking a serious look at the vines after the sugar level rises almost to the point where it is time to harvest, can be scared away with foil streamers that are hung at intervals so that they fly in the breeze.
But fungi are a different story. They require lots of attention, and no small amount of chemicals. Unlike California’s wine valleys, where vines grow in dry heat with cool nights and little rain, Virginia vineyards are subject to heat, humidity and lots of rain. (Especially this year.) All of which provides a good, but hopefully not perfect, environment for a variety of fungal diseases to take root, so to speak. Black Rot, Downy Mildew, Powdery Mildew, Botrytis (and not the good kind of Botrytis, the “noble rot” responsible for Sauternes) and many other diseases just lie in wait for the conditions that enable them to ruin a vineyard.
- Downy Mildew – similar to Black Rot, but no dark borders around the spots.
So, that means spraying. Not just once or twice, but routinely, weekly and especially after three-quarters of an inch or more of rain. We’d love to go organic and dispense with the spraying, but it’s not possible in Virginia, at least not with vines. I don’t know if other fruits and vegetables can be grown in Virginia without spraying, but I’m inclined to think you can’t. Certainly, Virginia Tech’s Cooperative Extension service web site has tons of information about spraying programs for fruit and vegetables, which implies that fungicides are needed. But whatever the case for other types of fruit, wine grapevines require spraying.
That’s also true in other environs. Gabriele said they had to spray in his native Italy (the Veneto region), for example. So, it’s not a crime to spray. But it does make for a lot of work and expense, one of the reasons, in fact, that Virginia wine is so expensive.
And by the way, if you're interested in this subject, the best source of information availale, at least for Virginia viticulturists — and probably for grape farmers everywhere — is Mizuho Nita's blog. It's a must-read for anyone interested in growing wine grapes in Virginia.
Spraying is a discipline, and it's one of those things you have to do when it's needed, whenever it's needed, with no exceptions. Hard work, for sure. But I think it's worth it, and that the end result of all that pest management will be wine that is truly memorable.
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