Vineyard Diary

As I mentioned in previous posts, our Twin Vines Vineyard is being redirected this year with the addition of a full trellis, along with a new training style.

The vineyard was planted with no trellis, the plan being to follow the old world "goblet" or head-trained method, which essentially leaves the plants to grow in a sort of manicured bush fashion. As previously noted, this caused problems due to the afternoon wind conditions that can occur, coupled with the high vigor of the site.

Progress so far has been rapid. Over the last week or so we have accomplished the following:

• All vines have been pruned, leaving one whip (which will become the cordon), and an extra spur as insurance just in case we need a backup. These spurs will be removed later as the cordon health is verified, otherwise they provide us with additional buds from which to grow a new cordon if need be.
• Currently, every 4th plant had a t-stake - these are in place to support the drip hose wire. These stakes have all been raised out of the ground by 6 inches so that the top of the stake is at three feet. This has two benefits - it raises the drop wire (which was really too low before) to around 13 inches off the ground, and it will allow the stakes to be tied into the cordon wire at around 3ft to form part of the trellis. Raising the drip wire makes it much easier to do weeding under the vine row, which has also now been completed.
• The end-posts (which were t-stakes) at the lower end of the vineyard have been removed, and the plants that were located there have been relocted to other parts of the vineyard to fill in gaps (due to gophers, mostly). It is really fairly brutal to move a vine like that, so we'll keep a careful eye on those ones. The end posts had to be removed to make way for the new ones, and the plants had to be removed as there would have been nowhere to put a cordon.
• All the trellis stakes have been positioned in the vineyard ready for pounding into place. We're placing a slotted trellis stake every 4 vines, which means that half the vines in the vineyard will have either a trellis stake or a t-stake for support. The remainder have pencil rods as training stakes.
• The end-posts have been positioned ready for pounding into place. The end-posts are 9ft long used oil casing pipes. These will be driven 4ft into the ground leaving 5ft protruding. They will be set at a slight angle to offset against the tension in the trellis wires, but since our rows are only a maximum of about 250ft we will forgo any other type of anchor. 4ft of pipe in the ground is not going anywhere!

Pounding the line stakes is ongoing as I write this, and we expect that to be complete in a day or two. The plan is to pound in the end-posts using a compressed air post pounder over the coming weekend.

The plants will be trained in a unilateral cordon style - basically each one will have a main "trunk" with one "arm" (cordon) so that it looks like an inverted "L" shape. We are doing basic VSP (vertical shoot positioning) training, which means that along each cordon there will be a series of spurs, each of which (after the first year) will be left with two buds. These buds will produce the fruiting shoots each year - only the first few buds of each shoot are fruitful - the rest of each shoot provides the foilage for the "canopy" of leaves which collect energy from the sun, and also provide a certain amount of shade for the fruit later in the season. Above the cordon, or fruiting, wire will be a pair of wires which are known as catch-wires - the growing shots from the spurs on the cordon will be trained to grow through these wires so as to maintain order and ensure that the canopy is formed over the cordon.

I will snap some photos over the next few days and post them here. So far, it is looking great and we are very pleased with the results. Thanks go to our neighbor and vineyard expert Jon Gerard and his crew for organizing and undertaking all the work on this vineyard project - we could not have done it without them!

Steve Wetherill
Escafeld Vineyards
Jolon California

Last night we had an inch or two of snow! This time, as if to make amends for last time, the snow settled. This weather is very unusual, the last time locals recall snow is around ten years or so ago.

We are preparing to prune our Twin Vines block (pictured) next week. That is, if the snow holds off! :)

Steve Wetherill
Escafeld Vineyards
Jolon, California

Some of you may recall that we planted 2 acres of "Bordeaux" varietals in our Twin Vines vineyard block in 2003.

We selected 110R rootstock, chose a mixture of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot planted in a ratio determined by averaging the published composition of many "Meritage" (rhymes with the English pronunciation of "heritage", believe it or not) and red Bordeaux wines. We also introduced several clones of each varietal, to see how each would perform in our location.

So this is, in many ways, an experiment. The other experiment we undertook was to train the vines in a head-pruned, "Gobelet" style. This was for a number of reasons, clearly with no trellis there is a reduced planting cost (when you plant a small acreage like this, and fence it, you soon run into inverse economy-of-scale factors as you have just as many rows in your small lot as you might see in a lot several times larger), but mainly we like the look of the gnarly old head-trained vines that can still be seen around these parts.

And so the experiment quicky began to generate results. As it happens, the site we have chosen turns out to be quite vigorous, with the rootstock we have. This, coupled with our planting spacing of 8 feet between rows, 5 feet between plants, has proved problematic. These little blighters very quickly filled all available space with sprawling growth, expecially between the rows, making travel along the rows with equipment impossible. The other issue we encountered is that in the afternoons the wind picks up in the vineyard, and blows directly along the rows. With no real trellis system in place, the only thing holding many of these vines in place was a puny pencil rod, but even on those plants which were tied to a t-stake, the wind was very efficient at ripping through any type of tying tape we tried. The result was that every day during the growing season, we'd be retying vines, fighting the sprawl as we went. It was not very satisfactory.

So, we are now doing what we should have done in the first place. The vines are very healthy, we have seen no hard frosts and the other parameters have been very encouraging. So, we are going to sink steel end-posts on each row and place a cordon wire at about 3 feet off the ground. We are going to go with a unilateral cordon approach, which will make each plant look like an inverted "L". Along the row, we are probably going to go with a slotted line post, that will allow us to place "catch wires" to catch the shoots from our vertical shoot positioning (VSP).

We hope to accomplish several things by doing this:

• The cordon and VSP training will point any vigor upward, primarily. This will get it up off the vineyard floor and make it much easier to do routine vineyard chores.
• By having a trellis in place, we will tie each vine to a training stake and to the cordon wire (the fruiting wire). This will give each plant much more stability in windy conditions.
• Having the inverted "L" shape face away from the wind will also help with breezy afternoon conditions.
• Additionally, we will take the opportunity to raise our drip wire up to 16-20 inches (it's probably at around 8 inches at the moment) which will afford much better access to the area beneath the drip wires for routine hoeing and other maintenance. Of course this will also raise the drip hose out of the range of all but giant squirrels and rabbits.

We have plenty of cordon-ready branches on most of the plants in the vineyard, on the the remainder we will cut back to two buds and aim to grow a cordon this year. At this point we still have not taken a commercial harvest from these vines, and actually this is probably not a bad thing. In the past two years we have allowed the vines to produce fruit, so they are in a fruiting cycle. By the time we do start to harvest them commercially, they will be that bit more mature which is generally thought to be a good thing overall.

I do plan on collecting some photos as we place end-posts, string wires and train back the plants, and will post back here as things progress.

Steve Wetherill
Escafeld Vineyards
Jolon, CA