Planting the Grape Vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard

This morning it was 21 degrees.  I need to wait for a few more weeks of cold weather before I start the winter vineyard pruning.  I have to prune 120 vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard, 330 vines at Castleton Lakes Vineyard, and then I am going to help Bill Gadino prune several thousand vines at Gadino Cellars.  So today I am looking back to when I planted Rosewood Hill vineyard almost 7 years ago.

Spring 2003

 

 

Last weekend two friends came to the farm to help me plant grape vines.  I had carefully planned to plant grape vines one weekend, walnut trees the weekend after that, and then Leyland cypress trees on the third weekend.  But my carefully laid out plans were waylaid when UPS brought both the Walnut trees and the grape vines at the same time.  There was no way I had time to get both planted so I took all the food out of my refrigerator and crammed 50 walnut trees inside.  My girlfriend at the time took a photograph because she considered that such an odd site.

 

The idea was I would start with a small hobby vineyard and then when I got some experience plant a commercial one.  I have since learned that I can make more money farming wine grapes for someone else.  Large vineyards and small wineries are profitable but a small vineyard usually is not.  In Virginia the rule-of-thumb is you need to plant 25 acres to have a profitable vineyard.  For that you would need probably 10 employees and maybe a $500K investment.  

 

My 65 acre farm has a couple of sites well-suited to growing grapes.  Here in Virginia where it gets cold in winter the idea is to plant your vines on a slope above the late frosts of spring or the early frosts of fall.  An early fall frost kills the leaves, which stops the grapes from ripening and a late frost in spring kills buds which have just begun to grow thus cutting in half or maybe more thar year’s yield of grapes.  

 

The top part of my farm rises to 1,000 feet while at the bottom it is 565 feet elevation.  I am grateful to Steve Critzer who talked me out of clearing off a vineyard site high up on the mountain where I had planned a commercial vineyard.  He had already brought his bulldozer to the farm when we cancelled this job.  The 15 degree slope up there would have been financially ruinous to work not to mention dangerous in the case of a tractor rollover.  There are so many rocks up there I would have had to haul dirt up from the bottom or from construction sites.  And in a drought vineyards need water, especially young vineyards.  To have piped water up that hill would have cost thousands.  And a vineyard surrounded by several thousand acres of uninhabited forest would have been devastated by deer, turkey, bear, birds, raccoon, in short every kind of predator.  It would have been better to place such a vineyard in a frost pocket in some suburb in Fauquier County surrounded by a monoculture of pasture grass and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.

 

Any farm is an ongoing operation which each year requires some capital improvements.  At that time I had neither tractor nor auger so the only way to plant these vines was by hand.  The soil in Virginia is not like other parts of the nation—here it is hard as a rock.  When I augur fence posts with my tractor I wait until it rains because even with diesel power the posts won’t go into the ground.  So I dreaded the idea of digging 140 holes for grapevines by hand, so I did what Tow Sawyer would have done:  I enlisted help.

 

In California you can order live plants to plant in your vineyard but here in Virginia we order dormant root stock from nurseries in California or New York.  These are grown for a season in a vineyard there and then grafted and tossed in the refrigerator for the winter.  Then you take them out in the spring and plant them.  The nursery starts by taking a dormant shoot from a native American grapevine, sticks that in the ground, and then it sprouts roots.  This forms the bottom part of the new grape vine.  Then they take a dormant bud from a European variety like chardonnay and graft that onto the American roots.  Together this is called a “rootstock”.  The idea is the bottom part of the plant is native to North America so it can withstand the attack of phyloxxera ad nematodes that would otherwise eat the roots causing the vine to die.  Also you can obtain rootstock which tolerates high levels of sodium in the soil (as in parts of California) or rootstock which grows slowly so that your vine grows slowly developing a proper balance of fruit and foliage instead of some overgrown jungle canopy which takes much work to wrestle under control. 

 

The grafted rootstock arrived in a UPS-delivered box from American and Lake County Grapevine Nursery.  The owner, Joachim Hollerith. lives most of the year here in Madison County and had been for many years the vineyard manager at Prince Michel Vineyards.  The graft union was dipped in paraffin wax so that it would not dry out and the whole affair was packed in damp saw dust.

 

The vines I had selected to plant were cabernet franc on 3309 rootstock, traminette on 3309, and viognier on 101-14.  I didn’t know much about rootstock at the time so Joachim picked them for me.  I had picked cabernet franc because it does well here in Virginia requiring less sunshine and heat to ripen that other red grape varieties.   Viognier is the white wine grape having brought Virginia international recognition when Chrysalis Vineyards won the San Diego wine show and when a noted Napa Valley restaurant run by a former White House sommelier carried Horton’s 1993 viognier proclaiming it the best he had every had.  Traminette I planted because I liked its European cousin the perfumed, highly aromatic gewürztraminer, but gewürztraminer does not do well in the heavy, humidity, and heavy rains of Virginia. 

 

The way you plant grape vines is you dig a hole about 2 feet deep taking care to dig out all the rocks and then you position the plant where the graft union is a few inches above the soil.  One hapless farmer in Virginia had planted his vines too low and when the soil settled the vines sank to the level of the dirt.  When that happens the top part of the vine, called the “scion”, sprouted roots thus bypassing the American rootstock.  His vineyard was thus subject to destruction from root-eating pests.  The vines I planted already had had their roots neatly trimmed with scissors so I didn’t need to do that.  You don’t want to cram too many roots into one small spot.

 

I takes much labor to plant 120 grape vines in one day especially when you are doing this by hand.  I should have hired some hard-working migrant workers to help me but I resolved to do this work myself.  So my friend Paul and I dug holes all day long while my girlfriend passed us vines while Paul’s 3 year old son played around the newly-erected trellises.  Paul was overweight while I was merely out of shape.  He worked as hard or harder than me in the heat and I worried he would fall over with a heart attack.  Some holes were fairly easy to dig while in others we found rock or even hard-pan (i.e. impenetrable subsoil) that I hacked at with a heavy pike.  We planted 105 vines in one day leaving me 15 to plant the next.  I tossed them into the refrigerator with the walnut trees and reviewed my vineyard budget.  

 

If you look at my actual expenses (graphic at the top of this posting, click on it so you can easily read it) for the first two year of my vineyard—not including the winemaking equipment I bought---you can get an idea of what is in store for you were you to decide to plant your own vines.  I spent $3,500 not including the chemicals I bought to spray the vineyard, the lime, the fertilizer, and other stuff I did not include in my budget.

 

If you are a hobbyist contemplating a backyard vineyard I would say, “Don’t do it”.  My work was the result of many years of going to seminars, working at vineyards in Virginia and Chile, and studying books.  I took the pesticide applicator certification test and spent countless hours pouring over the labels of pesticides and fungicides.  You cannot plant wine-quality grapes and forget about them.  Every in agricultural paradises like Chile or California that are free of mildew-inducing rain you still have to worry about maladies like botrytis and sour rot.  This is why you must spray grape vines constantly.  Even organic vineyards do this.  Because if you don’t your fruit will rot and the vines defoliate.  More than disease there is the problems of the aforementioned pests.  Twice I have lost most of my vineyard to raccoon that I have trapped and killed by the dozen and birds which of course are protected by law.  About the only thing I don’t have to worry about is nosy neighbors eating my fruit because the nearest is a couple of hundred yards away.

 

Looking at some of my purchases the first year you can see that I started with the most fundamental:  grape vines.  These were $2.95 apiece while currently ENTAV certified vines cost $3.95.  You need to buy grape vines from a reputable nursery because you don’t want them to arrive already infected with leaf roll virus or other problems.  

 

If you plan to put in a vineyard plan on buying lots of trellis wire and pressure-treated posts.  Take my advice and invest in a wire jenny.  You use this to hold the wire so you can unroll it in an orderly fashion.  When I cut the bands from the first of these very heavy rolls of wire it opened up line an accordion and tangled.  I spent countless hours cursing as I untangled this mess one misery foot at a time.  Had I to do it all over again I would have tossed out that wire and simply bought the wire jenny.  But even the landfill would not take this wire saying it would foul their equipment.

 

Any vineyard in Virginia is going to need a deer exclusion fence of some kind.  I started with an electric one with 3 zinc ground wires and a $105 electric solar powered charger.  Put an electric fence requires constant maintenance.  Now that I am farming goats maintenance is no problem.  At the time I got rid of the electric fence after a couple of years because I got frustrated that the fence kept shorting out.  I replaced it with a $400 plastic deer exclusion fence which works much better.

 

Vineyards in New Zealand put up bird netting because they have such a huge bird problem.  In Virginia large vineyards just sacrifice part of their fruit to the birds or put up noise makers or balloons that look like an enormous eye.  I bought $385 worth of bird netting which is still working after 5 years.  I read an account of one grape grower who says he and his wife almost divorce each other every year as they install and take down the bird netting.  Putting it up is tough enough.  But taking it down is worse because the vines will have grown into the netting somewhat when you take them off.  Veritas Vineyards uses netting which they install by tractor only in the fruit zone.  But for a small vineyard you need to enclose the whole canopy as those greedy little starlings will push their way into any small hole.

 

I also bought a German-built gasoline-powered backpack sprayer.  In Germany vineyards are planted on steep slopes of riverbanks to avoid frost.  It’s too steep to operate a tractor there.  I still use this $814 machine but need a tractor mounted new one because I am planning to plant 3,200 vines at Castleton Lake Vineyards and certainly cannot spray those on foot.

 

The rest of the items listed below are other equipment needed to build the trellis and prune the vines.  I have not included the cost of any fertilizer but in the acidic soils of Virginia you always want to start with putting down limestone and getting a soil report.  You can read details about the soil report here.

 

The sun is coming up here now on this frosty morning so I have to go outside and break the ice from the goats watering pale and give them a bale of hay to eat.  I am driving off the farm today so I won’t turn them loose into the forest.  Fortunately they have not bothered the vineyard yet but I have thought that setting sheep lose there would be a good idea to keep the weeds and grass under control under the vines.  You can’t do that with goats because they will stand on their hind legs to devour anything they can reach.

Planting the Grape Vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard

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