Trying Again

I'm going to try maintaining a blog again. I started one last April while stuck at the San Francisco airport for three days when we were trying to get home from our honeymoon. At that point I had lots of time to work on it and plenty of high speed wireless to work with. When we finally got home (three days later than expected), we were back to the world of dial up and I lost all motivation to work on it. So here goes again.

Here we are on the second day of April and I'm in a fervor trying to get so much work done in the vineyards before bud break. My day job has been consuming a little extra time lately, but hey, I work full time so I can afford to farm part time! We have two small vineyards located in south central Virginia. We lease a vineyard (Naked Creek Vineyard) about three miles from the farm that has a 1 acre block of Chambourcin which is 28 years old this year. We think this is the oldest planting of Chambourcin vines (of commercial size) in Virginia. That makes them a little special in my mind.

When I took over managing and working the vineyard in January 2008, the vines had been neglected for several years and were in bad shape. At times, I don't think I did them much justice last year either. It was a major learning experience for me though. You can take all the vineyard management classes in the world, but until you actually get out in the vineyard, you cannot really understand how all of the managment decisions fit together. Let me give you an example. We (my wife, Danielle, and I) jumped head first into the vineyard business that January with little more than ambition and a few classes to work with. Our first task was to prune the acre of Chambourcin with our main instruction being "cut everthing back to two buds." Well, in the few years previous to us taking over the vineyard, the owners had paid several people with little vineyard experience to prune. Let me back up and fill you in on the owners/previous mangers - they are distant family members on my Dads side of the family. They established this vineyard with a Chambourcin block and another block across the driveway with two different vinifera varietals (which are getting pulled out) to grow for Stonewall Vineyard and Winery. I grew up picking grapes there on a yearly basis as harvest days turned into a big gathering in our little community of Concord. The vineyard was planted in the early 80's and was well managed and produced well for all but the last few years. Then several years ago, Stonewall closed its doors due to health problems of the owners. At that point, the owners of the vineyard were pretty burned out on grape growing and were looking for an out. This is the point where I come into the picture. So here we were in Jan/Feb 2008. The vines had been pruned back to two buds in the previous couple of years but little was done to maintain vine structure. Over a couple of years the vines got to the point that they had clusters of shoots concentrate at one or two big knots on the old cordons. With little experience to go on, I did exactly as I was told - I pruned everything back to two buds. In turn I did little more than perpetuate clustering problem.

Then came our spray schedule. Or lack of one! Again, I was working on no experience and my first fungicide spray was in mid June. Even though Chambourcin is a French hybrid, it is not totally immune to fungal infections especially in hot humid Virginia summers. I started spraying about a week after I noticed a major outbreak of black rot and a few signs of phomopsis. Needless to say, last year was a bust when it comes to fruit production. I had Jeanette Smith of VineSmith out in late June to help me acess the situation and we decided to drop the fruit and try to make it a vine rebuilding year. So, with some remourse, began cutting all the fruit from the vines to help the vineserve resources.

Fast forward to last month (March 2009). Here we are pruning again, but this year we've know a little more of what we are doing. As I touch each vine, I try to have a vision of where I want this vine to go over the next couple years. I've given that vineyard a major "haircut." In many cases I've chosen the two strongest canes and laid them down to form cordons and cut everything else off. In come cases where I don't have 2 canes that I like, I take the whole vine back to just two buds total. With 28 years of root structure, they should really shoot up this year.

As of today I'm about half way through pruning the Chambourcin at Naked Creek. If we get a few days of sunshine I could get the rest done, but I'm not going to complain about all the rainy weather. We will be thankful for it in July and August. We also have a small (approximately 1 acre) vineyard at Spring Mill Farm (our home farm). We began planting this vineyard last year. We planted a row of NY 76.0844.24 which is a new hybrid of Traminette and Ravat 34 which we purchased from Grafted Grapevines in New York. We also planted 10 vines each of Viognier and Petit Verdot which we purchased from a nursery in California which I will not name. The quality of the vines we got from the California nursery was very inferier to the vines from Grafted Grapevines. All of the vines were planted within a day of each other with the same planting methods. They all received drip irrigation. To this point, all of the NY 76.0844.24 grapes have survived. Seven of the Viognier lived and only ONE Petite Verdot vine survived the summer. Needless to say I was very disappointed.

The home vineyard was easy to prune this year. I was done in about an hour! But, we are really working hard there too now. I ordered more of the NY 76.0844.24 and enough for a row of Petit Manseng. They arrived last week and I'm waiting for the weather to break so I can get them in the ground. We've also got lots of cuttings, which came from Cliff Ambers' Chateau Z Vineyard in Amherst, VA to get in the ground soon. Cliff has been a great help in my vineyard education. He is a wealth of knowledge and an advocate of growing grapes (anything for that matter) that are suited to your environment. He keeps telling me not to grow vinifera, and now I see why. Cliff is a grape breeder and has over 200 varieties in his vineyard. I'm really excited about the cuttings we've gotten. By the way, Cliff makes some great wines and sells at the Lynchburg, VA farmers market on Saturdays (and I think Wednesdays during the summer). GO SEE HIM! I'm rather partial to his Tobacco Row Red and Pear Wines. Both of which are sold out for the 2008 vintage. I think Cliff is developing a cult following over at Sweetbriar College where he teaches a couple geology labs and a wine evaluation class. When we were out getting cuttings, Cliff also sent us home with buckets of heritage apple and persimmon trees. I've got to get those planted too. Right now the are sitting in tubs of water. A couple of the apple trees are starting to push out leaves.

Well, I think that's enough for tonight. Sorry for such a long post, but I wanted to fill in the background on the two vineyards. There's plenty more going on around the farm here too. Hop over to Danielles blog, If the Trees Had Ears to see some of the goings on.