Wine Dreams

As spring comes forth, we are eagerly awaiting the delivery of our baby vines, also known as dormant bench grafts which will be planted in our vineyard and become our grape vines.  We expect that our vines will be delivered sometime in the next month or so.  The concern is that after we plant the vines and they begin to grow we will still have frost which could kill our babies.  So we will wait until there is little chance that frost will occur prior to planting the vines.

Once our vines are in the ground, it will be a minimum of three growing seasons before we have a commercial crop of grapes.  The first few years we will focus on building a solid root system, similar to building a foundation for a house, building or even a financial foundation.  You really want it to be solid.  We will drop any fruit produced in the second year and keep the fruit to a minimum in the third year.  Our goal is to build long term quality not just a quick fix.

My wife and I are deep into our remodeling project at our vineyard property.  The easy part was demolition.  No real thought required you take a hammer, sledge hammer, crow bar or what ever you may like and just rip the heck out of everything in sight.  We have owned our property for almost a year now, the demo went fast and relatively easy.  We ripped just about everything, OK everything out of the house except the studs and the sub-floor.  It can be almost cathartic!  Then it is time for the tough decision.  What the heck is this thing supposed to look like when we get started putting it back together and can we afford to pay for our vision.

Fortunately, my wife has this amazing vision.  She can see what a project will look like when it is done.  She can even see the colors and all.  This is great, but poses a little challenge for me.  I cannot picture a darned thing.  So I work on the things that don’t require the details and leave the rest to her.

We are now getting ready to have all new windows and doors installed, completely re-plumbing the house, having all new electricity brought in from a new larger panel out of the way and removed from the house.  All new heating and air conditioning is being installed.  The cabinetry has been ordered, and the plumbing fixtures are ordered as well.

Today we ordered the flooring.  My job now is making sure that all of the audio visual wiring is in place before the dry wall goes up.  Next week we will frame up the area for the fireplace.

The biggest challenge is trying to figure out what we will need into the future.  We have the opportunity to bury new water lines, electrical for outdoor lighting, make sure that we have gas lines where we might need them in the future…

This house is set in the middle of our new little vineyard.  We picture summer nights out on the patio over looking the vines and the valley sipping a chilled glass of Troubadour Sauvignon Blanc.

We have at least 3 more months of remodel project to go…

So probably the biggest choice or decision to be made when planting a vineyard is what to plant.  We had some very good information to get us started in our quest.  First we were very sure that Cabernet Sauvignon was our grape of choice.  With that in mind our next question was what type or clone of Cabernet Sauvignon would perform best in our area and maybe even more importantly what rootstock should we use to grow our Cabernet on.

The first question we worked on was rootstock.  Wine grapes are typically European grape varieties.  While they perform very well in the Napa valley, if they were planted naturally on their own roots they would be destroyed relatively quickly by Phylloxera which is a native American soil louse that attacks the roots of grape plants.  American grape varieties have the ability to co-exist with Phylloxera but American grapes don’t make very good wine.  So typically you plant an American rootstock in the ground and then graft a French clone of the grape that you want to grow on top of it.  The rootstock does not affect the flavor or characteristics of the grapes, but it could affect the growth characteristics of the vine.  The goal is to select a rootstock that best fits the soil you have to plant it in, along with the typical growth characteristics of the variety of grape that you will be planting.

Our soil is deep rocky soil which leans more towards the sandy loam and gravel then to clay.  We hope to use as little water as possible with the eventual goal of dry farming if the site will allow it.  To have a chance at accomplishing this we choose a rootstock that is very deep rooting and has great drought tolerance.  The rootstock that we choose is called 110R.

Next is the clone or selection of Cabernet Sauvignon that will be planted or grafted onto our rootstock.  Dr. Steven Krebs from Napa Valley College was very helpful in pointing us in the right direction on this front.  His idea was that we should plant a clone or selection of clones that were breed for the higher temperatures that we would get in Calistoga.  French clones are breed to ripen much faster than American clones due to the lower temperatures in the Bordeaux region of France.  He asserted that when you plant a French clone you will get a very fast spike in the sugar levels of the grapes without the benefit of physical ripeness.   However, the American clones tended to ripen slower since they were used to getting plenty of sun and heat.

With those thoughts in mind we choose to use clones 4, 8, and 30.  Which are all suited to higher temperatures.