Up Close Report: A vineyard in progesss

"The days of wine and roses laugh and run away like a child at play. . . ."

               Days of Wine and Roses, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, 1962

Let's give politics a rest today. Let's look at vineyards. 

Vineyards aren't child's play. They are hard work.

I am part of a movement and did not realize it. I was arranging to buy 6,500 grow tubes to protect the baby grape plants that will be arriving in two weeks. I asked the manager at Oregon Vineyard Supply if I was an unusual customer. He laughed.

He said, "There are a couple dozen landowners about like you here in the Rogue Valley doing the same thing right now. People who are retired or near retirement. People who own scenic rural land. People who like the looks of grapes. People who know about wine. People who want the tax deductions. Yeah, people like you."

Lynn Watson, showing a 24-inch grow tube

I am growing eight acres of wine grapes as Plan-B for my farm. My preferred crop -- alfalfa and grain in rotation -- isn't viable on the pumice-soil portion of the family farm. The pumice was too good a habitat for gophers who love alfalfa roots.

Southern Oregon is an up-and-coming wine region. I take the news of the popularity of new vineyards as a warning that I may be part of a foolish bubble. People are putting in grapes for their "amenity value" and the favorable tax code that allows accelerated depreciation. That is a formula for over-production and an unsellable crop. Local wine people talk about Southern Oregon as "the next Napa." That is supposed to be re-assuring, but it is the opposite. Wild optimism feeds bubbles. Americans should expect to pay about $30,000 per acre to put in a vineyard, and that is on top of the land acquisition. I may be making a costly mistake.

My post back in February showed photos of the buried irrigation lines, the first step in vineyard development. Grapes in Southern Oregon need irrigation, done by drip. The grape vines will be supported by trellises. Each row has an end post, pushed or pounded 4 feet into the ground. The round metal posts are recycled petroleum drill pipes. Each 10-foot post costs about $85 each and there is one at the end of each row. It takes expensive machinery and labor to push them into the ground at a cost of about $20 each to do so.

Then, every 18 feet, I installed a support post to hold up the steel wire that becomes the trellis for each row. I used recycled posts that cost about $8 each. It cost another $5 to push them in. They are used and therefore already rusted, and I like that look. There will be about 800 plants per acre and each post will support three plants, meaning there are about 270 support posts per acre. They line up in rows in multiple directions. This makes weeding, irrigation, and harvesting easier. The posts are designed to hold wire at different heights.

Notice those notches on the sides, every six inches.  The lowest wire will be at notch number three, about 18 inches off the ground. The next wire -- the cane wire -- is two notches above that, about 30 inches off the ground. The wire slides into those notches.

Each reel of wire weighs 100 pounds, more than I like to lift, but I can do so, barely. They cost  $240 each. It has about 3,800 feet of wire. The long rows in the photos above are about 700 feet long. The tag shows the wire was fabricated in Canada from Chinese steel. The dust on the bumper shows one of the attributes of the pumice soil. When dry it is dusty.

The drip line unwinds off a spool and is laid along the trellis line in preparation for attachment to the wire.

There is a handy clip every two feet along the drip line, visible in the photo as the little black vertical bumps on the tube. The drip line attaches nearly effortlessly to the wire once one gets the technique down. It is sort of like twisting off the top of a beverage bottle while pressing the clip against the wire. Clips are two feet apart, for each of the 6,500 total plants. Doing anything 19,500 times becomes hard work. 

The drip line is a Rain Bird product. It is a private company headquartered in California. I thought I was "buying American." The drip line is manufactured in Mexico.

There are handy metal fasteners for the wires called "gripples," a bargain at only a dollar each. I buy them in containers of 200. They connect the trellis wire segments and are used at the end posts to tie off the ends. They are ingenious in how securely they hold the wire under tension, but it means one or two wires stick out and create a puncture hazard. It is hard to notice the stiff wire until it pokes you, perhaps in the eye. My weekend task is cutting off those wire-hazard ends, a chore I am doing myself because I don't want to delegate this. There are six or eight gripples for each of 200 rows, or about 1,500 gripples with one or sometimes two wires to trim off. Doing anything 3,000 times is work.

Gripple and hazard wire

The grow tubes are about a dollar each. I bought 6,500 recycled 4-foot long metal rods to press into the ground near each new plant. That will support the grow tube. Those pencil-thin rods were 75-cents each, delivered. They don't just magically appear around each plant. Someone needs to place the rods and grow tubes with enough care that the plant isn't damaged. Again, doing two little jobs 6,500 times becomes a big job.

The bare root Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Malbec plants coming mid-June cost about $5 each, delivered. They need to be planted, which involves digging a one-foot deep hole in the six-foot spacing along the drip line. Will the grapes produce great wine, or even good wine? We won't know for five years. That is agriculture. I am optimistic. The eight acres of pumice soil on my farm is unique. It is fine-grained, ground-up pumice stone. It is weirdly porous. Plant roots have an easy time extracting nutrients and flavors. Corn grown on that land was noticeably different -- superior -- to corn grown elsewhere. There is potential for the vineyard to produce something special, but who knows?

I will write about that in a future post.

Pumice soil, tilled. Like eight inches of powdered snow.

Meanwhile political life continues.  President Biden spoke from the Oval Office, DeSantis criticized the Covid vaccine, Pence is getting ready for his formal announcement, a tape recording emerged of Trump acknowledging that he had secret documents, and 339,000 new jobs were created in May.

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