Dropping fruit

Another vineyard post.  

Skip this one if these don't interest you.

I am feeling my way growing grapes.

I get lots of advice, and much of it is contradictory.

Amid the pushes and pulls, the "Do this," and "No. Instead do that," I am trying to grow big healthy vines with strong roots -- , plants that will, in the years ahead, produce good fruit. I planted the vineyard three years ago, and that is a three-year-old grape plant.

I make errors. Maybe they don't matter, and maybe they aren't really errors. People disagree over what is best to do. I brought the mental inertia from growing melons to the vineyard project.  For melons, big, green unstressed vines, growing in very fertile and easily-worked soil, getting all the water they need, means large yields of healthy, delicious melons. Big vines mean good melons. This is sort of true for grapes, but there are trade-offs, and some people tell me that approach is absolutely wrong. They tell me that great fruit comes off vines that struggle to survive, and that grapes must just barely achieve ripeness before frost and fall rains destroy the crop. 

My grapes look big, green, and healthy, the way good melon vines look. I probably watered too much in the early part of the summer, before I cut back. Ample water on fertile soil meant that I had enormous vines growing over a foot in length every week. I had a lot to prune for no good purpose. My Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir vines had fewer grapes than they might have had, because the plants were putting energy into growing foliage rather than grapes. 

Notice the bits of rust-colored dead leaves on the ground in the photo above. They are remnants of recent pruning, but they give a misleading impression of how much canopy I removed. This photo, from early July, gives a more accurate view.

The cut material dries up and nearly disappears in a few days. A better impression of the cane growth comes from observing the long strings of stem in the photo below. And that plant has been pruned repeatedly.

I gave the plants a small drink of water yesterday, amid these 95-degree days. A close look at the grapes showed that some were "raisoning." The drip irrigation leaves those dark spots, one every two feet. The plants are spaced at six-foot intervals. 

This week a crew "dropped fruit" on the Malbec vines. (I could do it myself, but the workers like the $30/hour I pay, and they are way faster and better than I am. I don't like jobs that require repeated stooping any more.) Apparently dropping fruit was necessary, although why it was necessary was a matter of controversy. Maybe I was just wasting money, throwing away perfectly good grapes, since, given our climate, even a heavy crop would have matured before the fall rains. But there's a school of thought that dropping fruit means the remaining grapes will have richer flavor.  Another school of thought is that these young plants aren't ready for heavy crops of the kind I got on my Malbecs. I left the Pinot Noirs, with a lighter set, as they were. My Cabernet Sauvignons have very few grapes.

Here is what dropped fruit looks like on the Malbecs, before and after:

Dropping the fruit may reduce the risk of mildew inside the tight grape clusters. My vineyard has a lower chance of mildew because I am irrigating from below, not overhead. Notice the black tube drip line. It is 12 inches below the fruit hanging from the horizontal cane wire. 

I have worked diligently to have a bare-ground field, which also affects the potential mildew issue. Most vineyards in Oregon have green grass or mowed weeds between the rows. In my case, the people who installed the grape trellis posts brought puncture vine into a few rows of the vineyard, carried on their vehicle tires. I hate puncture vine, also known as goat-head vine. The only way to find and remove every single puncture vine plant before it grows seeds is to have the ground bare. The light-colored pumice soil is reflective, so it makes the vineyard both hotter and less humid than it would be if green grass between the rows were respiring moisture. 

Here is a close up of how grapes hang.

There is a horizontal cane, tied down to the cane wire, mostly hidden behind the grape clusters. Notice that about every six inches there is a brown vertical cane. They look like fingers that rise up out of the palm of your hand, if the palm of your hand is the cane wire. Then, attached to each of those upright fingers is a rugged umbilical cord that attaches to the grape cluster, which then hangs down. Ideally there is a single grape cluster per cane finger.

There is another way to grow grapes, and my neighbor is trying it. He has Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, and they are right next to mine, just across my driveway. His soil is exactly like mine, and, like mine, his plants are in their third year.

He pruned this winter and spring so that there would be canes attached to the wire in both directions, forming a cross, which I won't do until next year. He watered far less and has far less canopy than I do. But his Cabernet Sauvignon vines have far more grapes than mine. 

I grew all three varieties in an identical way, trying for those big, healthy vines. In my Malbecs and Pinot Noirs, the big canopies brought ample fruit. But in the Cabernet Sauvignons, I probably should have made the vines struggle more, as my neighbor did. Probably. The test isn't whether the vines look lush, or whether a smaller plant gives more grapes. It is whether we have excellent fruit that we can sell because the winemaker thinks it will make good wine that he can sell.

His land is just like mine, both part of the original 180 acres farm purchased by my great grandfather in 1883. The soil in this area is a deep layer of ground-up pumice rock. There is very little of it in Southern Oregon or anywhere else in the world. It was blown here when Mount Mazama exploded 7,200 years ago, leaving Crater Lake as a remnant of the cataclysm and a layer of pumice at my farm as another. My neighbor doesn't have the puncture vine problem, so he mows his field. By happenstance, we have a good experiment going with two growing methods to compare. We will see which style of watering, weed control, and pruning creates the better, more marketable grapes.

I make a virtue out of the unique pumice soil on this part of my farm, land above the floodplain of the Rogue River where it hasn't washed away over the millennia. The ground is bone-white in color. It is the consistency of powdered sugar. Soil this fertile and fine-grained may allow the capillary roots of the grape plant to exploit the unique micronutrients in the soil and extract flavors that would otherwise be inaccessible. Pumice soil has complications for the farmer, but it is worth the trouble when growing melons. This ground produces unusually good melons. That I know already. I like its potential for growing great wine grapes.

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