Category Archives: Wine Growing

End posts and vine count

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IMG_5131What a job! We are almost done having the end posts installed. We had originally planned on having 88 diagonal rows but as it came out we have 84. The others would have been to small for the expense. There is a little tractor that basically pounds the end posts into the ground. I swear you can hear the pounding all the way to downtown Sebastopol. We are hoping we did not get them to close to the fence. 10 feet to turn around on the diagonal and around 15 feet when the row is vertical to a fence or a tree. It will not make much difference in the first few years, but if we decide to have a small tractor, it might be a problem.

Last week we decided to count all of the knives in the ground and see how many plants we will need for the vineyard. Joey and I went up and down every row and found out we had 3138 vines before the end posts went in, hundreds more than we had planned. When the end posts went in we lost a few so I think we will have more than 3100 vines. Anything over 2916 (again, our lucky numbers) will be planted in Chardonnay for our own consumption. With only 200-250 vines we will probably have to go in with one of our neighbors to get a barrel…but it should be enough for 20 cases of good Chardonnay. I just met a couple who are recommending Clones 76 and 96, so have to do more drinking, I mean research, to see what to order.IMG_5163

Highway Stakes

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Highway stakesToday we put in the main body of the highway stakes for the vineyard. Because we put the vineyard at an angle, we have to adjust where to put the posts near the edge of the vineyard to get the support the vines need. I have found out that normally the posts are put 18 to 21 feet apart, so in our case with 3.33’ spacing, we put the highway stakes every 6 vines. In the old days you had a large metal can with handles and pounded them in the ground. Now as you can see there is a small tractor that pushes them in and all we have to do is hold them straight and then adjust them later. It took us about 4.5 hours this morning to put in about 500 stakes. The remaining 160 I will put in by hand. Probably a lot more work than the 500 today. Yes, we bent a few. The they guys knew how to straighten most of them out. Oh, the funny picture below was a little adjustment needed on the tractor.

I’ll put a picture in this weekend with all of the posts in the ground. The amazing thing is they all line up in any direction……so cool.

I forgot to mention…as you can see below we took them from the pile near our garage and arranged them in the vineyard. Imagine trying to carry them (10 pounds each, doing 6 at a time) from one end of the land and fill in 1.3 acres and then line them up so the tractor does not run them over, no need to go to the gym.

Friday I’m going to lay out the rest of the highway stakes and start on the 2200 rebar stakes….can’t wait!

Time for Stakes and Posts

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steel on truckTomorrow we start putting in the vine stakes, 3” pipe end posts and the rebar for the grape vines. Sounds pretty simple but we have to put in 662 stakes, 176 end posts and 2295 pieces of rebar for the 2916 vines. In addition we are going to start to put in 1200’ of 4 foot deep gopher wire around the vineyard next week. One of the local vineyard managers laughed at us saying gophers will go 7 feet deep.

I found it interesting that the truck load just backed up into the proposed vineyard and dumped it all on the ground. I guess it does not really matter since we are going to be moving it all in the next few days. Amazing how much steel you get for $11K.

steel on land

Who cares about clones, just pick two?

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IMG_5048If you have been following the blog you probably realize that Joey and I were trying to be very scientific about picking our Pinot Clones for our vineyard. We will plant these in the spring of 2010 at bare root vines. Here is our funny but true story:

1. We spent an afternoon tasting clones at Lynmar Winery in Graton. Probably tasted 25 different clones in different barrels. A lot of fun and we picked two intense clones that winemakers love…..Swan and Calera.
2. Found out that Swan and Calera are prone to viruses, so we contacted Merry Edwards who is the closest to us and she suggested Mt Eden to go with 667 that was our backup clone.
3. We ordered these in May. Found out last week the nursery forgot to order them and now they are not available from them or another nursery.
4. Called six other nurseries for available rootstock.
5. Talked to the winemaker at Graton Ridge who said clones are over-rated. He was more concerned with sugar content, vine yields, temperature during fermentation and pH. He said to plant what you want and make the best wine you can.
6. Picked another nursery to purchase vines from.
7. DECIDED TO GIVE UP AND JUST PICK THEM OUT OF THE HAT. HAD FIVE TO CHOOSE FROM: 115, 667, POMMARD, 777 AND 2A. I HAD THE HONORS AND PICKED 115 AND POMMARD.
8. Found out today that 115 from this nursery is not certified clean, so we asked our Viticulturist and he said to put Pommard with 667.
9. We are now checking this out and putting in an order next week. Hope it all works out.

Oh…..I won’t go into this but we had also picked different rootstocks….but what comes with these was not what we wanted originally but should work fine. Just have to make sure I don’t water them to much.

So the moral of the story is to just pick clones that grow well in your area and are in wines you like.
Let us know in 4 years if you think we made the right decision.

Plan B on our vines…..ours will not be available!

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IMG_5058I wish this was a picture of our vines growing in a nursery….but we had a disturbing call. On Thursday we found out that the 3000 Pinot Noir vines we were going to plant in the spring are not going to be available from Nova Vines. The graft did not take well on one of the clones and the other clone DID NOT get ordered. OOPS!!! Needless to say, we were not very happy since they already took 2 payments from us. We have three options: find the same vines from another nursery (tried, but one of the clones we wanted is not readily available), change our clone selection to one that is available, or just plant rootstock and hope the grafts in the field work in a year. The only good news is we have now decided to add a few hundred Chardonnay for one barrel…..so that is easy to get.

Don’t know what we are going to do yet but we don’t have to make a decision immediately, probably have a month or so.

Stay tuned for another round of clone selections. I hope we get to do more barrel tasting!

Laying out the Vineyard – Joey sets the starting place

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Layout vineyardOn Thursday we started to lay out the vineyard. It would have been so easy had we put in the vines going east-west….we could have started by the fence and done this ourselves. (OK, maybe not after having seen a crew of 5 spend almost 3 days here on our land and they are not done yet.) Greg wanted to make sure the sunshine was equal on both sides of the row and we wanted a good view from our Dining Room and Deck…..both of these coincidentally made the orientation 40 degrees from north-south. As you can imagine that makes laying out 3000 vines at a spacing of 5 foot rows by 3 1/3 foot vine spacing a little more difficult. Try to imagine a wire with markings at the vine spacings and geometry to get row spacings and you can see this would take a long time. We are hoping that in the next few days they will have it all done and we can count the little plastic knives in the ground to make sure we have enough plants in the spring. We were both a little freaked out now that they have most of them in……it looks like a lot of plants spaced very close together. The picture on the bottom is the first row of knives in the ground.

Tilling and Discing our Plot of Paradise

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d8The Cat D8 weighing 55,000 pounds finally arrived on Thursday. Having never had land tilled, I was amazed at how easily the the large tines went into the ground and turned over the soil. Matt made 3 passes on the land….vertical/horizontal/diagonal. He started at around 2 feet and then by the end was down a full 4 feet on most of the land. In the areas over the septic we only went down 2 feet as we didn’t want to ruin our system…..not a good idea. The idea of tilling is to mix in the 27 tons of amendments we put on a field a few weeks ago and also to mix the topsoil with the sand and clay that is below. We are trying to get the pH of the soil to around 6.5 that is ideal for grapes. Most of the amendments were lime and gypsum which will do this for us. In addition, 4 feet of soft soil is ideal for our roots to grow. We could have gone deeper, but the pH of the soil in the 5-6 foot range was very low, so we did not want this for the grapes.

grading landIt might be hard to tell from the picture, but after tilling we still had very large clods of dirt. On Friday (and a little this coming Monday) we disced the land. This breaks up the clods and smooths out the land. I can’t believe how fine the dirt is now, especially since just a few days ago I had to use my jack hammer to dig down and find the septic system.

Tilling the land, false start

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D8 tiresHad a little false start on tilling the land. After waiting for 2 1/2 weeks for the D8, our unfriendly neighbor decided that she would not let us use “her” road and also did not approve of our vineyard and would not allow us to start. So……after having this woman yell for 45 minutes we sent the truck away. It will be back on Wednesday with a sheriff to allow it on our land. What fun, but we did learn a lot about Sonoma County. It is a Right to Farm County…..so as long as you follow the right rules and get the right permits, you are free to farm your land. Also, all private roads are not alike. In order to be truly private you have to enforce rules….like limiting access which is not the case here. Lastly, apparently this neighbor did this before to the folks who built the house we now own 13 years ago. After some lawyer bills, she backed down and they were allowed to build.

So, will see how much fun we have when the tractor shows up again….can’t wait.

Amendments

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amendments by truckWell, after waiting all week for the trucks to arrive, they showed up Saturday morning. We had 3 truck loads come and spread all of our amendments that were pre-mixed on the ground. It made quite a mess from the lime that was spread to the very dry topsoil. Next week the soil will be tilled to mix the amendments to a depth of four feet. This will raise the pH of the soil from 5.6 to around 6.5….a sweet spot for grapes.

Here is what we added to the 1.3 acres:

Mined lime 10 tons
Gypsum 5 tons
Compost 15 cubic yards
Calcium phosphate 2 tons
Potash 1 ton

amendments 2

Finding the Septic

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original septic findingIn order to prepare the land, we are adding amendments and tilling them into the soil. On the side of the house is our septic system. For the bulk of the parcel we will till to 4 feet. Over the septic I had to find how low it was buried so we would not hit it and set the tines correctly on the tractor. I started by using a shovel, but this time of year the clay in the soil makes digging almost impossible…..so I remembered I had a jack hammer that I used at the last house for digging holes in clay. Made the task a lot easier, but still a lot of hard work. I found the septic about 3 feet down.