Vineyard D.I.Y.

Starting your own vineyard: It requires algebra?

The vineyard last summer....

In my last post, I discussed how we found a perfect southeasterly-facing field to plant our vineyard.  According to our bible, From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine by Jeff Cox, our next decision was, how much wine did we want to drink?  He walks you through this weighty matter in a very mathematical manner as follows:

First, there are three assumptions:

1.  A mature grapevine yields about 8 - 12 pounds of grapes
2.  11 or 12 pounds of grapes yield a gallon of finished wine
3.  Vines are planted 6 feet apart in rows 10 feet apart

x = Gallons of wine desired
y = Pounds of grapes yielded per vine.  Jeff Cox says about 8 pounds for vinifera and 10 for most French-American hybrids.

Here's the algebra.....

                       

X x 11
   Y

You know what?  Forget all this diligence and careful planning!  Taking a break from our fevered computations, my husband-to-be perused the grapevine catalog.  The price for 50 vines or more was $3.50 per vine. The price for under that? $8.50 per vine.  We were buying 50 vines even if our house collapsed under the weight of the sterilized wine bottles we would need. Frugality trumps Rationality any day!

Starting your own vineyard: Choosing a site

When we started our vineyard in 2003, I really have to admit, we had our site handed to us.  Our friend, John, had inherited a farm in Northeastern PA, about 20 acres. Being an incredibly generous person, he gave us free rein to plant some vines wherever we wanted.  Part of these 20 acres included "the lake" (as in, "are you going up to 'the lake' this Memorial Day?"),a magical place where cookouts, camping, and summer swimming took place. 

To the east of the lake through a bit of woods were some farm fields that have been fallow for a long time.  We decided one of these fields would house the vineyard.  We just had to decide where on these fields would be the best place to plant.  The first thing we did was to consult our two bibles.  

According to Jeff Cox, author of From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine, "after the selection of a variety, the next most important factor in achieving fine wine at home is the selection of a site." He goes on to say that the best site for a vineyard is a slope that faces southeast to southwest in cooler areas or northeast to northwest in really hot climates.  Northeastern Pennsylvania is definitely a "cooler" area.  It is best to situate the vines on the top third of the hillside because the bottom of the hill can harbor "frost pockets" where the denser, cool air slides down the hill and collects in pools at the lower elevations.  Who knew? 

So we hit the fields with our compass.  Two of the fields sloped toward the country lane below.  Miracle of miracles, when we pointed the compass north, we hit the jackpot with a southeast exposure! 

Here is the field where it all started!  This view if from the top of the hill facing Southeast down toward the country lane and the Delaware River beyond.  A perfect slope!  It's hard to believe this scrubby field would become the lush green vineyard at the top of the page.

Starting your own vineyard: Read a lot before you start

Our Vineyard....Cabernet Franc

     As an environmentally conscious person, I wanted to grow our vineyard as organically as possible.  We weren't sure that was even possible in Northeast Pennsylvania.  We definitely knew we had to do a lot more research before we broke ground.  Following the advice of the "Wine Grape Agent" from the Penn State Cooperative, we decided to read some good books on the subject.  I had a feeling there would not be reems of published material about how the hobbyist can grow grapes organically, and sure enough my internet search revealed few options.  Luckily, we didn't need many because the two books we ended up with became our bibles!

This book is actually entirely dedicated and geared toward the amateur person growing a few grape who perhaps like us has ridiculously little knowledge but is doing is doing it anyway!

The other book we read so  much the pages fell out is:

 

Both these books can be used as a step-by-step guide to vineyard planning and planting.  We initially read entirely through both books and kind of got overwhelmed.  So we kept a lot of things in the back of our minds and then went back through the books section by section. 

Both books are laid out very logically and are written in simple language with a lot of illustrations; just perfect for the novice grower who is just starting to grasp the difference between French-American Hybrid Vines and Vitus Vinifera.  The first chapter of both books deals with types of grape-vines and which ones you should plant.  We had already decided to plant Cabernet Franc and Traminette after talking to a local vintner.  We figured he knew a lot more than we did and already has experienced success with these grape vines, whereas the books just cannot get very region-specific, although there is a lot of nice-to-know information in the first chapters. 

Since we knew what type of grapes we were going to plant, we were now faced with the following decisions:  where to plant them, how many to plant, and how to space the vines.  Luckily, our new books were more than equipped to help us answer these questions which will be dealt with in another post!

How to start your own vineyard: More about research

  

  I had mentioned in a previous post the immense amount of help and handouts I received from the Penn State Cooperative extension when I called to ask about starting our own small vineyard.  I actually spoke to the "Wine Grape Agent" on the phone and he was extraordinarily friendly but is probably still reminiscing with his scientist colleagues about the woman who clearly knew next to nothing and called him out of the blue chirping with enthusiastic questions about starting a vineyard.  When he followed up with a letter, he had three pieces of advice:
    1.  May I suggest that you read as extensively as possible before you enter into this considerable commitment of time and resources.
    2.  I would recommend that you spend as much time as possible visiting vineyards and wineries around the region.
    3.  There are dozens of meetings and workshops around the region during the course of a year, all are excellent sources of up-to-date information. 

    Well, we had done our best, especially with advice # 2.  We sampled wine from the local vineyards, including a warm, slightly queasy outing at the Pennsylania Food and Wine Festival one humid day during the summer of 2002.  

    We also took a trip to the Finger Lakes region of upstate NY.  Other than some initial research for our trip, we had never been there and knew relatively little about the area or the wines it produced.  Eager to get a flavor for the place, I suggested taking a bike tour of the wineries mapped out in a "wine trail" brochure I picked up at the bed and breakfast on Keuka Lake.  It was rated a short, moderately difficult circuit exposing the leisurely cyclist to about 4-5 wineries. 

    Well, our ignorance of the area obviously extended to the topography, since we were completely unprepared when our bike route took us from a quaint spin lakeside through town to a muscle tearing, lung searing climb up a dangerous, shoulder-free switchback to the first tasting room perched in the clouds.  I tried to ignore my future husband's accusatory gasps for breath.  If he could have raised his head, I'm sure his eyes would have been accusatory too.  Being the more unbalanced of us, I pedaled obsessively and vertically to the vineyard drive still trying to maintain the fiction that this was a good idea while he walked his bike the last quarter mile.

    It was hot.  We were sweating.  Who wanted to drink wine?  The first three or four wineries are now a blur.  Somehow, we persevered.  It did get easier after the initial climb up the nearly perpendicular slope from Keuka lake.  We were now on a ridge going relatively horizontally.  We cruised into the last winery and stared at each other in wonder as we tasting Dr. Konstantin Frank's wine.   

    We almost didn't go to this vineyard.  Dr. Frank?  We thought it was some medical doctor with a small vineyard in his backyard.  We couldn't have been more wrong.  Dr. Konstantin Frank turned out to be a pioneer in American viticulture with more gold medals(and probably brains) to his name than Michael Phelps.  Apparently, when he arrived in the Finger Lakes from Russia in 1951 with his Ph.D. in viticulture, he tried to convince fellow winemakers in the region that they could grow vitis vinifera grapes instead of the French American hybrids currently planted because they would withstand the cold upstate New York climate.  It was all in the rootstock, he said.  No one believed him until about a decade later when he was producing Pinot Noir that would knock your eyes out.

  

Dr. Frank's revolutionary vineyard on Keuka Lake

    Boy, I really digressed on this post.  I wanted to focus on advice # 1 about reading extensively, but I'll save it for next time!  If you haven't tried Dr. Konstantin Frank's wine, I really recommend it, especially some of the Rieslings!

How to start your own vineyard: Which grapes to grow

     

New Cabernet Franc vines ready for planting.  Vinifera Cabernet Franc grafted to American Rootstock

    So after some research, we learned that in a pared down family tree, wine grapes are grouped in three main species:  native American, European or vitus vinifera, and French-American hybrids.  (Read previous post for details)  Armed with this knowledge, we were ready to speak with some local vintners about what type of grapes we should plant.  We knew we wanted to divide the vineyard between red and white varieties but we didn't know what would grow in our region.  Ideally, Bill would have liked to plant Cabernet Sauvignon and I would love some Riesling.  

    This part of our research we did very scientifically and seriously -- we zig-zagged Northeast Pennsylania in search of good wine at local vineyards.  We waded through quite a bit of some quite good apple raspberry and blueberry wines, but Bill had his heart set on vinifera.  We had read an article in the paper about a local vintner who had planted some vinifera, French-American hyrids and native American varieties and had a reputation for making good wines.  We tried most of them and they were good.  

    We finally tracked him down in a storefront where he sold his wines and he was compassionate enough to not laugh outright at our extremely naive line of questioning.  We basically shuffled up to him like prospective mafiosa approaching "the boss" and blurted out "we're starting a small vineyard just north of here and we're trying to figure out what to plant!"  "We want to plant Cabernet Sauvignon and Riesling, what do you think? "

 
    He really was kind.  He said that the growing season in our area was too short and the winters too cold to plant Cabernet Sauvignon.  We really should consider Cabernet Franc, which is a vinifera variety that is actually the parent of Cabernet Sauvignon.  It is grown primarily in France in the Bordeaux region.  It would work much better in our area because it starts budding a week or two earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon (and therefore ripening before the first frost) and it is much better at surviving cold winters!  Wow!  We had never even heard of or tasted Cabernet Franc but right there and then, that's what we were planting on the red side of the vineyard.   It was just what we were looking for, a "serious" red wine that would withstand our relatively harsh climate in the hills overlooking the Delaware River in northern Pennsylvania.

    He felt that Riesling would have trouble during our hot, humid summers due to fungal diseases that thrive in this climate and instead recommended Traminette.  We learned that Traminette is a cross between a French-American hybrid and Gewurztraminer, a vinifera variety that I love.  The result of this cross is a grape that makes very high quality wine and tastes like Gewurztraminer but has the disease resistant traits of its American ancestors.  

    We left his store (with a few bottles in hand) with one large piece of our puzzle solved.  We would plant with Cabernet Franc and Traminette....we took his word for it!

How to start your own vineyard: Grape Varieties

    By far one of the most difficult topics to research was which grape varieties we would plant.  We decided to divide the vineyard between red and white grapes although Bill's innately fine palate would have been happy with all Cabernet Sauvignon.
   

    The wine world was really a hazy jumble of French and Italian names to me.  I knew the well-known varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc and associated these wines with regal vineyards in Europe or California while Concord and Cayuga conjured up the chilly lake regions of North America.  We still didn't know what varieties would grow in our region and in order to talk to someone local about it, we really had to be more knowledgeable about wine in general, so we really had to start our research with the basics of wine grape evolution.  

    At the risk of making this post very dry, I think it is necessary to quickly outline the grapevine family tree.  Remember Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species?  Grade school biology?  Well all grape vines are of the genus Vitis.  Come on, this actually gets interesting, with a French/American anti wine snob happy ending!  

    In the beginning, there were two major grape species at the top of the chart.  The Eurasian species Vitis vinifera and the American species Vitis labrusca. Vitus Vinifera grapes have been used for centuries to make the subtle, nuanced, pedigreed wines from Europe.  Leading red vinifera varieties are Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Noir, Merlot, et al.  Leading white vinifera are Sauvignon Blanc, Reisling, Chardonnay.  American Vitus labrusca varieties are the strong, grapey(known as foxiness in wine circles), table grapes such as Concord, Catawba, and Niagra.  

    Now, here's where the history got interesting(at least I thought so).  Apparently, when the first American settlers hit Roanoke Island in 1584, they found a land full of wild grapes, later known as the Vitus labrusca varieties.  There is evidence of these settlers, Captain John Smith in particular, trying their hand at wine making as early as 1606 but even then found that "Neither doth the taste so well please when they are made in wine."  Later settlers reasoned that where wild grapes flourished in North America, European vinifera grapes would also grow well.  There were endeavors to plant vinifera vineyards in every colony of the New World by the late 1600's.  Without exception, the vines died from mysterious illnesses that did not affect the native varieties.  So fine European wines could not be produced in America, probably much to the relief of European vignerons.

    So what were the diseases that were killing the vinifera vines that enterprising settlers tried to introduce to the New World?  The most virulent was a pest called phylloxera that attacks the roots of the vines, killing whole vineyards in one growing season.  In the mid 1800's, this microscopic bug was to have an appalling affect on the centuries old wine traditions of Europe.  During this time, American grape varieties were brought to Europe for study by wine enthusiasts.  These American vines carried phylloxera, although they were immune to it.  In the blink of an eye, thousands of hectares of European vineyards were wiped out by phylloxera.  Some regions have not recovered to this day!  But here's the kicker....the only way to save the European wine industry was to graft the regal vines of Europe to  tough, wiry American rootstock.  Terror in the terroir!  C'est impossible!  Cabernet Sauvignon with Concord roots?  What ignominy...

    From this ghastly time in wine history forked a new branch on the wine grape family tree:  French-American hybrids.  These hybrids were a cross between vinifera varieties for the fruit quality and American grapes for toughness and disease resistance. 

   

  

How to start your own vineyard: research

The vineyard in late March 2009

     Once we brought up the idea of starting a vineyard on Bill's friend John's farm, John's enthusiasm brought us quickly from conceptualizing to researching.  We really knew nothing about growing grapes, especially the "serious" varieties.  What we did know is that growing grapes is a climate-specific topic;  the grape varieties you are able to grow and how you tend them varies markedly from region to region.  So we had to find someone in Pennsylvania who was knowledgeable about growing wine grapes and would be willing to waste time helping someone who was not going into full-scale wine production.  So in May of 2002, our research began in earnest.  I probably googled "growing wine grapes in Pennsylvania." 

That's when I found the Penn State Cooperative Extension.  A cooperative extension is an organization in each state funded by the Department of Agriculture that gives individuals access to scientific research done by an affiliated university.  All states have a cooperative extension, but not all of them have a program devoted to wine grape growing.  Pennsylvania happens to have a great program, The Wine Grape Network, because they are really trying to promote the production of high quality wine in the state.  I was actually able to call the "Wine Grape Agent" who runs the program and pick his brain about what steps we should take to get the vineyard started. He sent me a huge packet chock full of information for the novice grape grower. 

While this packet contained tons of information to sift through, the wine grape agent gave us three pieces of advice that gave structure to our research:  1.  "Read as extensively as possible  before you enter into this considerable commitment of time and resources."  2.  "Spend as much time as possible visiting vineyards and wineries around your region.  There is a great diversity of ideas, methods, traditions and practices in every grape area."  3.  There are dozens of meetings and workshops around the region during the course of a year, all are excellent sources of up to date information.  Workshops aimed at new growers are quite common.

     We took his third piece of advice first and attended a New Grower Workshop.  While it was aimed primarily toward people who wanted to grow larger quantities of grapes either to make wine or to sell to wineries, we came home with more piles of handouts full of valuable information. 

I strongly recommend finding your state's cooperative extension and find out if they have a Wine Grape program.  The link below contains a list of viticultural programs in various states under the heading "Selected Resources for Growers."

http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/hort/faculty/reisch/grapeinfo.html

   

The idea germinates

     When my husband, Bill, and I began dating, he had a vat of homemade wine percolating in his basement.  It was a hobby he became interested in after he and his friends thawed out one night in their hunting cabin sharing one guy's home-brewed dandelion and elderberry wine.  So he and his dad started experimenting with different fruits growing on his father's property- raspberries, plums and concord grapes- and loved the results.  As the progeny of an Italian family that made everything from scratch, the wine-making process intrigued me.  That spring, we picked hundreds of dandelions and painstakingly separated leaves from flowers.  After about an hour of this tedium, I wanted to just throw leaves and all into the fermenting vat.  Luckily, Bill's orderliness prevailed and we completed the task with yellow-stained and bruised fingers.  The result was lovely-- lightly sweet and tangy.   
    But it was not enough.  Bill's taste runs to what I considered "serious wines:" Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Pinot Noir.  He loves red wine, the dryer the better.  We decided we wanted to make these wines, but how?  Should we use bottled wine concentrate?  Never!  That was akin to serving lasagna  made with Ragu!  I knew he and his dad had grown some Concord grapes on his dad's property.  So why couldn't we grow some serious grape varieties?  Wouldn't it be cool to have our own vineyard?  Can Cabernet Sauvignon be grown around here(Northeast Pennsylvania)?  How would you even begin such a project?
     Now this vineyard idea, while ambitious, hadn't come entirely out of thin air.  It actually had roots in solid soil - Bill's best friend John's family farm.  John had inherited a small farm that had gone fallow and was now used for hunting and for recreation because there was a lake on the property.  "The lake" is a magical place upland from the Delaware river.  From a country lane fronted by disused farm fields, there is a barely discernible dirt, tree-lined track that leads to the lake.  It is a social epicenter for Bill's close friends and their families; the scene of memorial day picnics, amateur 4th of July displays, and summer swimming.  One day, we asked John if we could use of portion of one of the fields to grow grapes.  He answered, "When do we start plowing?"

The track to the lake

The lake in early spring