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!

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.

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.

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.

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 planted.  The frost may only last for a couple of hours, but it’s still a freeze, and that can damage the vines.

Here’s what Dr. Wolf had to say about the risk of frost damage to vineyards:

 Aside from the obvious site considerations, the extent of bud/shoot development will affect the potential for frost development. Swollen, unopened buds can withstand temperatures into the low twenties. Even opened buds with a leaf or two exposed can occasionally withstand temperatures as low as 28 or 29F under some conditions. With some variance due to wind speed, cloud cover, and the relative dryness of the air, the temperatures (degrees F) that will damage grape buds and shoots are: dormant bud (<20F); dormant swollen (26F); burst bud (28F); one leaf unfolded (28 – 29F); and two or more leaves unfolded (29 – 32F). The forecast dewpoint temperatures for Tuesday morning are in the high teens, surprisingly low, meaning relatively dry air. This means that temperatures can dip quite low before condensation begins to form on tissues, and the drop in temperature will be fairly rapid. Those who are monitoring air temperatures in advance of flying helicopters or activating wind machines should be aware of the low forecast dewpoint temperatures, and will probably start active protection at actual temperatures of 35 to 37F, rather than waiting until 31 or 32F.

As Dr. Wolf notes in the excerpt above, some vineyards will be flying helicopters over the vines tonight to push warm air down.  I don’t think we’ll be doing that for our 14 vines.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not worried.  We have more than a few leaves unfolded on the Fairfax vines, and I’m guessing the same for the Nelson County vineyard, although I won’t know for sure until next weekend.  I’m thinking we’ll be okay in Nelson County — those vines are

Another angle on one of the vines in the Fairfax Vineyard. Yes, the rows are being overtaken by weeds. I promise, I'll take care of it!

are on the high side of a slope, and the cold air will wash down the hill.  Fairfax is a different kind of issue.  The elevation here is about 450 feet, low by any standard, and the terrain is flat, so the cold air will just sit.  In both vineyards, however, we “hilled over,” which is to say, we mounded dirt up over the graft union on the vine, which hopefully will protect the vine itself, although I’m not sure how this year’s buds will fare.   But it’s one thing to lose a harvest, and quite another to lose the vineyard itself.

We had thought we might plant the first of the new vines in Nelson this weekend — 25 Petit Manseng that arrived late in the week.  With the rain, we decided to wait another week, and as disappointing as it was, maybe it was a good thing in the end.

In any event, the frost warning was a lesson.  Viticulture may seem more glamorous than raising corn or potatoes, but no matter how you slice it, it’s still agriculture.  Farmers have been battling weather for as long as crops have been planted, and our venture is no different.  We can apply modern technology by bringing helicopters or wind machines into the vineyard, or trying to raise the freezing point with foliar nutrient sprays, but in the end, we’re still at the mercy of the weather, not unlike our ancestors from many centuries ago.

All I can say is that the wine is worth the effort.

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 possible to get the equipment, buy the posts and put everything in myself.  I called a couple of fencing companies who told me in a cheerful way that yes, they could do the work, but the ones I talked to were pretty vague about past work in vineyards.

I thought about posting a note on the Virginia Vineyards Association site to ask for ideas, but it finally hit me that the there were state resources to draw upon.  So, I called

Another shot of a row, with the plowed earth more visible

the Nelson County Office of the Virginia Cooperative Extension, and asked for help.  Michael LaChance, Agriculture and Natural Resources Agent, gave me the name of a local man who could do the work: Jay Goodwin, based in Arrington, Va., a small town in Nelson County.

And he was great.  He met with us Sunday morning a few weeks ago, and talked through some trellis design ideas.  We kept it simple.  We’re going for Vertical Shoot Positioning, or VSP, throughout the vineyard, and Jay recommended using an “H-brace” at the end, instead of the more traditional anchor post that’s set at a 60-degree angle to the ground, with an anchor holding it down.  The H-brace accomodates two vines underneath, so we would get an extra four vines per row.  And in a small hobby vineyard like ours, we don’t want to waste any more space than we have to.

Here’s the wire, loaded on a “spinning jenny” that will be used in constructing the “H-braces.” Same kind of wire that the vines hang on.

It took a good bit of time to map out the vineyard, and we went through a number of different designs, which I’ll elaborate on in a future post.  For now, though, suffice it to say that Jay started the job last week, and by the weekend, he had ripped the rows down to three feet, and installed all of the line posts.  I have to say, we were thrilled.  It wasn’t finished, but it looked like a real vineyard.

This week, he started construction of the H-braces.  We won’t be able to see them until Saturday, but based on the work that’s already been done, I’m sure it’s going very well.  I’ll talk more about them in Part II.  And before I finish, let me say that we think it possible the first of our vines, 25 Petit Manseng, will be delivered this weekend, so we can start with the planting.  Unless, of course, it rains.  Which seems likely.

How does anyone manage to plant in the Spring?

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 of them, I knew we’d be able to build an adequate trellis around them in the second year.

This spring’s planting is a bit different.  Obviously, 150 vines are pretty small potatoes for any commercial winery, but for us, it’s quite a big deal.  Erecting a trellis around 100 foot rows would be difficult once the vines are in the ground.  So on Saturday, we met with a local contractor recommended by the Nelson County agriculture extension office, and we’re pretty sure he’s the right guy to put in the trellis and the first part of the deer fence.

First things first:  we plotted out the vineyard on Sunday for a second time, mostly to

The Vineyard Goddess prunes a vine in the Nelson County vineyard

confirm the measurements from our first survey, but also to adjust to some new thoughts on vine spacing.  We’re going to work with rows spaced seven feet apart, wide enough for each row to get sunlight, and wide enough for my tractor to get through.  Originally, we thought we’d space the vines 3.5 feet apart; now we’re thinking three feet.  There’s lots of controversy over proper vine spacing, but these days vineyards are trending toward planting vines closer together.  I’ve talked to a number of vineyard owners who started off a few years ago spacing the vines six feet apart, only to drop down to three feet on the most recent plantings.

We decided on an “H-system” for the end posts, instead of the more common angled end post anchored into the ground.  We think that configuration will allow us to plant an extra vine or two at the end, and we’ve allotted eight feet for it, although it’s possible we need only six.  We also allowed for 20 feet at the end of the rows for a tractor turnaround.  For a large commercial vineyard, those distances are a drop in the bucket.  But for our property, each three feet we lose to a turnaround or an end post is one less vine that we can plant.

At the end of the day, we were pretty happy with the layout of the vineyard.  We’re planning to have the contractor set all of the posts (about 80, counting both line posts and the H-system end posts), plus build the first part of the deer fence.

A vine in the Fairfax Vineyard, waiting to be pruned

And that’s the second thing.  We’ll need an effective deer fence once we start getting fruit, but for now what we really need is a dog fence, to keep both Phoenix the vineyard dog, and his new sidekick, Glory, the vineyard-dog-in-training, from tromping around and over the vines.  (Which initially will look like sticks for them to pull out and chew on.  Honestly, dogs have no respect, even vineyard dogs.)  Since the vineyard already has a four foot fence on three sides, we think we can get away this year with just putting on the fourth side.  That saves some money for now, even if it is just kicking the can down the road a bit on spending,  And when the time comes, I think there might be a cost-effective way of extending the existing fence another four feet higher.

And while we were at it, we finally got around to dormant winter pruning.  (Yes, I considered a joke about the two of us being dormant through the winter, but I wisely discarded it.  You can thank me later.)

Dormant winter pruning is the primary means of controlling a vine’s growth.  Left on their own, a vine’s growth is limited only by the height of the object it’s growing on.  If it’s in a forest growing against a 60-foot tree, it will grow 60 feet and then some, looking for the light at the top of the forest.  Growing in a vineyard against a six-foot high trellis, without proper pruningm the vine will still grow out of control, creating a tangle of shoots.  All that growth will make it impossible to produce quality grapes with a decent concentration of sugar, and eventually it will affect the health of the vine.  So in the dead of winter, most often in January or February, the vineyard manager will ensure that the vines are pruned back to the appropriate number of buds.

How many buds are optimal?  Well, it’s a balancing act.  Upwards of 90 percent of the

The same vine in Fairfax, after pruning

previous year’s growth will be removed.  But if too much is removed, the remaining buds will produce shoots that exhibit excess vigor, and the size of the crop will be needlessly reduced.  Remove too little, and you get the ill-effects of overcropping.

In the second year, you end up pruning the vine back to almost nothing.  We saved two, and sometimes three of the shoots on each vine, and trimmed each of those shoots back to three buds.  I felt like a butcher, and when I was finished hacking my vines down they seemed like pitiful little sticks, each less than a half-foot tall, rather than plants that would eventually produce wine grapes.  But that’s what all of the books and all of our classes told us to do, so we obeyed.

Hopefully, our pruning would satisfy the Goldilocks test – not too much, not too little, but just right.  We’ll see.  After we finished, we had a moment of panic, wondering if we had miscounted buds, or otherwise damaged the vine.  But Tony Wolf, the viticulture expert at Virginia Tech, said somewhere in one of his many articles or books, that unless you hack the trunk away completely, you can’t kill the vine by pruning it.

Let’s hope.  And meanwhile, I keep reminding myself that these first vines are all about learning.  The wine will come later.  Oh, yes.

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.

Dr. Bruce Zoecklein after an afternoon-long lecture on Sensory Evaluation for Grape Growers

The seven wines each exhibited distinctly different characteristics, and as Dr. Zoecklein worked through his lecture, we would periodically taste one of the seven, always in comparison with another wine, which most often was glass 1, an inexpensive, but well-made wine that served as the control glass.  It’s one thing to talk about the effect of astringency on a wine, but quite another to taste it, and the tastings drove his points home very effectively.  (And to make it more complicated, astringency is not a true taste, but more of a sensation.  And yet, it is clearly part of what we perceive as taste when we drink tannic reds.)

  I won’t recount the entire lecture, which was focused on grape chemistry, but I’d like to offer a few nuggets of information that surprised me.  Actually, what I liked best about the seminar is that it challenged a lot of ideas that I thought I understood, and reminded me just how complicated each aspect of viticulture really is.

  For example, like many, I’ve always thought of brix as a key – perhaps the key – measure of a grape’s readiness for harvest and the quality of the wine that will be made from it.  And that’s true, as far as it goes.  But as Dr. Zocklein noted, we emphasize brix in part because it is so easy to measure.  (Trust me, almost anyone can wander through a vineyard with a refractometer and test brix.)

  And while brix is a measure of potential alcohol, the key word is “potential.”  We frequently think of the relationship between brix and alcohol as .55, so that a brix of 22 will translate into alcohol of 12.1, but Dr. Zoecklein explained that there is considerable variation in the percent of alcohol that comes from the measure of brix, and the conversion rate can actually vary from .52 to .62.  That’s because alcohol is determined by the ratio of soluble solids to liquid, and not all the solids in the grape are sugar, which is what brix measures.

  Moreover, there is considerable variability from vine to vine, even in the best vineyards, due to asynchronous ripening of grapes.  “Each berry matures separately, but they are all harvested together,” Dr. Zoecklein said.  So, if you harvest at a certain brix, there will be a wide variation among the grapes that are picked.

You can see that if you walk through a vineyard, post-veraison though to the harvest.  Even within a cluster, it will be obvious that some grapes have ripened more quickly than others, and the ripest grapes will have very different sugar levels from the less ripe.  Each grape is different, and that’s one of the reasons sorting tables are so important.

Again, while brix is the easiest thing to measure, it’s far from being the only important factor in the quality of wine from a particular harvest.  Acidity, pH, phenolic compounds (particularly tannins and anthocyanins), the health of the grapes (“a little rot goes a long way” toward ruining wine, as Dr. Zoecklein put it), are among the many factors that contribute, and Dr. Zoecklein provided quite a good introduction to the whole subject over some three and a half hours Thursday afternoon.

It was noteworthy that this lecture was aimed at grape farmers.  As the old saying goes, good wine is made in the vineyard, and so it’s of obvious importance for the vineyard manager to keep his eye on the end-product, the wine, throughout the growing season.  And for me, on this first day of the technical meeting, the lecture was another reminder of how much there is to learn about the whole field of viticulture and enology.

There were lots of other reminders over the next two days, which I’ll be discussing in posts later this week.  Stay tuned for more notes from the Virginia Vineyard Association’s 2012 technical meeting.

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.

 Verticals are interesting.  They show you in a very direct way just how much the

Table setting: glasses waiting to be filled

same grape, grown on the same soil, can differ from year to year because of weather and decisions that are made in the cellar.  I don’t have the world’s best palate, so I tend to be less detailed in my tasting notes than others.  But even a novice could appreciate the differences between these five vintages.  (And on the subject of tasting notes, I think that “delicious” is a perfectly valid and complete judgment, as is “ugh,” or any varioation on that theme.)

 The 2005 and 2006 Cab Francs were both light and fruity, although the ’05 had a better mouth-feel, compared to the more velvety (I actually wrote “silky” in my tasting notes) ’06.  When we tasted the two, they seemed like very different wines.  By the end of the tasting, I was thinking of them more as slight variations on the same theme.

 You could see the difference between those two and the next two vintages as soon as the wine hit the glass.  The 2007 and 2008 were deeper in color, not exactly inky, but dark and lush.  These wines exhibited darker fruit, black cherry in particular.  They were bigger wines than the first two, but still very smooth and drinkable.

Bill Gadino talking about Cab Franc.

   Much of the difference had to do with weather, as Bill Gadino explained.   In 2005, Hurricane Tammy hit in early October, forcing vineyards to pick earlier than they might have liked. 

The 2008 growing season, by contrast, turned very hot in late summer, and featured drought conditions in August.  At Gadino, the grapes were harvested on October 11, a good week later than 2005.  Brix, which is a measure of the sugar level in the grapes, came in at 23.3 in 2008, compared to 22.4 in 2005.  The higher brix results in a higher level of alcohol and a bigger wine.

 The 2009 was my favorite, a wonderfully-balanced wine with lots of red-berry fruit that developed during the dry spell late in the growing season.  It also had the highest brix of any of the five, coming in at 23.5.  Bill Gadino, the owner and our host for the tasting, told us that in the verticals they’ve done over the years, the wines have changed a lot as they’ve aged, and often seem like different wines in each sucessive tasting.  It will be interesting to see how the 2009 tastes next year, and especially how it will stand up alongside the 2010s.

 I would have loved to sample some Cab Franc from the highly anticipated 2010 vintage,

Glasses after they’ve been filled

but the Cab Franc won’t be bottled for a few more weeks.  The 2010 season was nearly perfect, and expectations are very high for the wines.  However, we did get an early sample of the 2011, the vintage that most Virginia wineries would just as soon forget.  The rain at the end of the season brought on a plague of fungal diseases, and it was a challenge to keep the fruit on the vine long enough to get the sugar levels up.

 So, I was pleasantly surprised at the barrel sample of the 2011 Cab Franc.  I don’t have nearly enough experience in the cellar to be able to predict how a wine will turn out based on a sample from the tank, but I can say that there was no evidence of methoxypyrazine, a compound in the that is responsible for the vegetal flavors that are sometimes found in wines from areas with short growing seasons. This wine has a lot of aging ahead of it before it will be ready for bottling, but it seemed to me that it was already showing promise.  I don’t think it will be a great vintage, but it certainly won’t be the washout that so many had feared.

 One last thought on the five wines in the vertical.  None was a “pure” Cab Franc.  Instead, each was a blend in which Cab Franc was the dominant grape, with small amounts of Merlot, Petit Verdot, and, in one case, Cab Sauv, added.  The 2009, which I liked the most, featured 76 percent Cab Franc, 12 percent Merlot and 11 percent Cabernet Sauvignon.  (I’m assuming a rounding error.)  Personally, I have always preferred blends to varietals made from a single grape, since the blending of different varieties adds complexity and balance to the finished wine.  The Gadino Cab Francs illustrate this point nicely.

 And finally, let me say something about the mystery wine.  It was a wonderful wine, and it turned out to be a Cab Franc from France’s Loire Valley.  Was it better than the Virginia Cab Francs?  No.  Was it worse?  Again, no.  Was it different?  Yes.  For me, that was one of the the takeaways from this event.  France, with centuries of experience, makes great Cab Francs, but Virginia does so as well, and it does so year after year. I can’t say that Virginia Cab Francs are better than France’s, but only that they are different, and that each can be enjoyed immensely for what they are.  

  Despite Jefferson’s dreams, Virginia is still a relative newcomer to the world of viticulture and winemaking.  The fact that Gadino’s Cab Francs can be compared so favorably alongisde wines from France speaks volumes about how far Virginia has come.

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

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?

And in 2011, the decision was even more difficult, since for many vineyards, waiting wasn’t an option.  Because of the frequent rain this year, berries swelled and shrunk over and over, finally splitting, which brought on sour rot.  The rain also led to abundant disease, particularly Botrytis.  So, many vineyards found themselves picking earlier than they would have liked, sacrificing sugar to save the harvest.

Picking my heart out in a block of Cab Franc vines. These look pretty good.

Under-ripe grapes often exhibit green, vegetal flavors, a result of a compound known as methoxypyrazine, and I have worried in a number of recent blogs that this year’s difficult growing season could leave us with some very green reds.  In her report on the harvest, however, Emily provided a bit of hope that Virginia reds might turn out okay, particularly Cabernet Franc, which was the subject of my last post.

She wrote that a group of Central Virginia winemakers got together recently to taste 2011 Cab Francs, and talk about what worked and what didn’t in the winemaking.

“Two important observations came about,” she said.  First, “the best Cabernet Francs were truly vineyard driven, sourced from vineyards that just seemed to get less rain or ripened before other sites.”

That much was probably expected.  What she said next was not.

“The really interesting thing was that in our region we did not find a huge level of methoxypyrazines.  Given the ‘numbers’ one would expect more underripe, or green fruit characters in the finished wine. Not so in our tasting. The fruit was ripe, it just lacked the flavor intensity, colors and tannins we wanted due to the constant wet(ness).”

That last finding surprised me, and it is definitely a cause for optimism.  Cab Franc is probably Virginia’s most widely planted red grape, and it is an important not only for blending (think Bordeaux), but as a varietal.  That’s especially the case in Virginia.  And it’s especially important to me, since we’ve decided to plant a third of our small vineyard in Cab Franc.

We’ll see how the vintage turns out.  But as one who worked through a couple of vineyards this fall, I can tell you that the grapes were a mess.  And so, one last bit of wisdom from Emily rang especially true.

“I just want to clarify, and make sure everyone knows that 2011 was not the year of the winemaker, it was the year of the Sorting Table!”

Hear, hear!  Winemakers will do their best to work some magic in the cellar, but it was at the sorting table that sharp-eyed workers with quick hands made a real difference by separating out the good from the bad.

And while I’m not yet ready to make wine from fruit, I did work at the sorting table in a couple of vineyards.  I’m not mentioning any  names, but it’s just possible that the next bottle of Virginia wine you drink will owe its drinkability to my work.  No guarantees here.  I’m just saying.