A Trip to Valley View

I’m back from our Spring Break on the Florida beach and feeling much better for the trip.  Like any self-respecting grape grower, the arrival of Spring has one thought on my mind – I need to start spraying chemicals on some plants.  Thus, the first free moment I had I headed straight to Valley View Garden Center.  Though its name sounds like salad dressing and there’s no valley in sight, Valley View is without question greater Baltimore’s premier garden store, and the ideal place for the grape growing amateur to shop for the perfect fungicide. 

As regular readers will know, in determining a spray regiment for this coming growing season, I sought advice from no less than two PhDs, one day-long seminar, a half a dozen textbooks, and the Home Fruit Production Guide published by the University of Maryland seemingly particularly with me in mind.  Yet, when the moment of truth arrived, what did I purchase, but whatever the Valley View salesperson told me to.  I had every intention of following an efficient yet diverse spray program that would  protect my vines from every foreseeable threat, but at the end of the day I was convinced to purchase a single, blended product that would meet all my spraying needs at once.  I think that’s what’s called point of sale marketing, and apparently, like the rest of the world’s consumers, I find it quite compelling.

Nonetheless, I now find myself the proud owner of some semi-lethal chemicals, and according to the salesperson, as long as I sport the proper footwear while spraying, I should come out no worse for the wear. 

To a T

This weekend it was time to prune my six vines at the Hilton Estate (also known as my sister’s backyard).  As explained in my previous post, the goal is to establish a permanent “T” shape within each vine.  With my vertical trunk established last season, this season was all about developing the horizontal arms.  Each vine had about five or six canes forming the shape of a fan, so my job while pruning was to choose the two on each vine that seemed the thickest and in the best position.  The rest of the canes, or about two-thirds of each vine, I removed.



After



Before



I have to say I’m quite happy with how the row turned out.  The pruning took me about an hour, or 10 minutes per vine.  Not a big deal on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  Of course, an average acre of vineyard has about 800 vines, so if I’m ever to realize my dream of owning a 30 acre vineyard, that equates to about 167 straight days of pruning. 

I know what you’re thinking – “Joel, where did you get those sick math skills?”  Well, I was born that way.  And if I can interest you in a little pruning in my vineyard, I might even be willing to tutor your children. 

Pencil Thick



As the 2011 growing season inches closer my own anxiety grows with it.  While my winemaking confidence has been steadily increasing, I still feel like a complete novice when it comes to grape growing.  As a reminder, I have six two-year old vines planted in the sunny backyard of my sister’s house about 40 minutes away (the Hilton Estate), and one vine, in less than ideal conditions, in my own shady backyard (the Goldberg Vine).  As expected, the Hilton Estate has thrived, and if I can avoid black rot, Japanese Beetles, and other assorted invaders, I should have my first true harvest come this Fall.  The Goldberg Vine, however, is a year behind.



The only real job a grape grower has between harvest in October and bud break in April is to prune the vineyard to prepare for the growing season, and this weekend I did that on the Goldberg Vine.  The goal in the early years is for each vine to establish permanent wood in the shape of a “T”, with one truck and one cordon (or arm) coming out from each side.  Any wood you keep, however, has to be at least pencil thick in size to thrive.  Last year, I didn’t have any that thick, so against my better judgment I followed the guidance of the books and pruned the entire vine back down to the ground.  This year, a cane finally grew thick enough to keep, so I trimmed off everything else, leaving 5 or 6 buds on my new trunk which will hopefully grow to produce my two permanent arms.   



As the pictures here illustrate, after two years of growing, all I have to show for my efforts is what looks like a twig coming out of the ground.  From this vantage point, doesn't seem like much to be anxious about.



Before



After



Back to School

I recently treated myself to a one-day seminar called the New Grape Growers Workshop hosted by the University of Maryland.  I’m not certain if this classroom setting complies with my “self-education” concept, but I decided not to split hairs over it.  The head lecturer began each discussion with the same slide:  “Good wine is made in the vineyard.”  Makes sense. 

In the end it actually turned out to be pretty entry-level stuff, and some of it I could have done a decent job of presenting myself, particularly the lecture on financial modeling.  Sample question from the audience:  “I understand that this generic model you’ve built is for a single acre vineyard, but what if I have 10 acres.”  “Then you multiply all these numbers by 10.”  “Ok, but what if I have 20 acres.”  Nonetheless, there were still a few kernels of knowledge that I picked up, most notably that I’ve probably trained my Corot Noir vines on the trellis the wrong way, I should have been spraying fungicide all along, and besides, the wine produced from Corot Noir grapes tastes “just ok” anyway.  Hmmm, maybe I should have attended this workshop two years ago before I planted.  To be honest I wasn’t that discouraged though, it’s better to make your mistakes on seven vines then 30 acres, and that is why I call this my “dry run.”

Determined to fight on, I went home and racked my Chardonnay off the oak cubes, and noted that the wine was tasting pretty darn good, thank you very much.  No surprise really.  After all, good wine is made in the vineyard, and these grapes came from California and not from my sister’s backyard.