Hello and Welcome,
This is the April Climate Update from Amalie Robert Estate.
The 2015 vintage is “on-line!”
The vines are all sporting new shoots and they are growing at an incredible
rate. The spring cover crop mix of Buckwheat and Vetch has also taken hold and
will become food for our vines in the fall. Between the fits and starts of
rain, wind, hail and sun, we have been pounding posts in the new Wadenswil
block, by hand. And oddly enough, once Ernie tightened up the alternator belt
in the tractor, the battery has been staying charged up. Hmm, success leaves
clues…
Generally speaking, it has been a
pretty nice April to get some farming done. Farming, we should point out, is
what you are doing when you are not growing wine. Farming includes things like
mowing the grass - repeatedly, scheduled equipment maintenance like changing
the oil, and
unscheduled equipment maintenance like tightening the alternator
belt. Pounding posts is considered
WTH?NFW! is a farming lexicon
and it means “What The Hail? No
Farming Way !” But it’s true, we had hail during
April and below freezing temperatures. The worst thing that can happen is that
the pea sized hail can hit the new shoot with such force as to remove it from
the vine, and there goes this year’s crop of wine berries. And whatever is left
behind is fair game for Jack Frost. If those hearty shoots survive the hail,
below freezing temperatures can lead to the same result – no wine berries for
you! If that happens to your vineyard site, then you have all summer to go
“farming.” And that is why vineyard site selection is all about strategy first
and monetizing your terroir second. That’s Ernie in the tractor getting a first
hand look at April hail.
So, we are in “good shape” to
start growing wine. The late April and early May tasks include removing
“double” shoots from the cane that will crowd the canopy and make shoot
positioning an even more arduous task than it already has to be. We also remove
the water sprouts (aka suckers) at the graft union where the rootstock meets
the vinifera.
During the grafting process,
these two pieces of plant material form new parenchyma tissue (typically composed of living cells that
are thin-walled, unspecialized in structure, and therefore adaptable) that will
grow together and fuse the vine into a single plant. In farming terms this is called
callusing. It is at this graft union, about 5” off the ground that the suckers
will grow. Doing about 1,452 deep knee bends per acre can get you in
“good shape.”
Then in May we can look forward
to the Oregon Strawberries, shoot positioning, and catch wires. Every May the
prized little Oregon Strawberries hit the market. They last just a few weeks
and then they are gone for another year. If you are local, then you know. If
you are visiting, seek them out. Oh yeah, shoot positioning and catch wires, yum.
A vineyard is a physical implementation
of a mental construct. Looking at a vineyard affords the opportunity to look
into a farmer’s mind. Before we decided on how to layout our vineyard we read,
studied, talked to people, and performed the ultimate research with finished
wines grown on a variety of trellis designs and vine layouts. Our brains were
collecting and processing data constantly. We thought our heads would explode -
and here is yet another use for duct tape.
Then we fell into analysis paralysis,
but only for a minute or two. We had no time for that, we had to get to farmin’!
So we decided to space our vines 4 feet apart and leave 7 ½ feet for Ernie to
run the tractor through the rows. The posts are all steel; we are “Heavy Metal”
farmers. It was a good decision that has minimized tractor blight to the posts,
vines, tractor, implements and operator.
The finest engine in the world is
no more than a boat anchor if you can’t tune it for the race you are running. The
trellis is where we separate the farmers from the wine growers. A trellis
consists of two end assemblies, intermediate line posts, and miles and miles of
wire. Each row of our vines is trellised using VSP (Vertical Shoot Positioning)
and needs to support about 3 pounds of fruit per vine along with all the vines’
leaves to ripen it. A row of 100 vines yields about 300 pounds of fruit. And it
needs to stand up to wind gusts, freezing rain and all of the other vagaries of
“farming.”
VSP@ARE means “Vertical
Shoot Positioning at Amalie Robert Estate” where each plant has its shoots
tucked into 3 sets of catch wires over about a 6 week period of time by a crew
of humans. Now, the guy who used to own this piece of dirt grew Montmorency
cherries, which required very little hand work, if at all. He patiently
listened as Ernie shared his mental construct. At the end he smiled and said,
“Well Mr. Pink, you are going to be busy.”
Growing wine keeps you busy. We
now have just about 44,000 fruiting vines that include Chardonnay, Pinot
Meunier, Pinot Noir, Syrah and Viognier. There are a few Gewürztraminer vines
too, but don’t tell anybody. It’s a secret. And each vine has about 16 shoots
we need to tuck into those wires. So some simple farming math leads us to about
704,000 shoots to tuck by hand. And we make three passes because we have 3 sets
of wires. And we use about 5 clips per vine to hold everything in place. A
quick check of the abacus yields 2.1 million “touches.” Spread that out over 6
weeks and it’s not so bad.
Good separation in the canopy
helps keep our fruit healthy to hang through the fall weather and develop those
signature ARE aromas and flavors in our wines. The result is exemplified in
this physical implementation:
That enables this mental
construct:
And now it’s time for the
numbers! Numbers are what you use when conveying something that is more than “hardly
any” but not quite as much as a country mile. Numbers add a sense of comfort in
knowing that you have defined something right down to the gnat’s ass. For
example, everyone knows the 15th digit of PI is 9, but 3.14 will
most likely get you where you need to be. If the opportunity ever presents
itself, ask the folks at Intel about the Pentium chip and “rounding error.”
Q: How many Pentium designers does it take to
screw in a light bulb?
A: 1.99904274017, but that's close enough for
non-technical people.
We have accumulated 53.6 degree
days for the first 30 days of the growing season beginning on day 91 (April 1),
2015. The first half of April did not record any degree days, and therefore,
all degree days were recorded in the second half of the month. This is another
example of the “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive” principle.
The high temperature for April
was a balmy, if not scorching, 80.1 degrees on April 20, at 4:40 in the
afternoon. In farming parlance, this is known as beer’thirty. The morning of
April 29 hovered right at 34.2 degrees from 5:40 until 6:40. It was a fine time
for a second cup of coffee and a warm slice of 3.14159265358979.
And it rained, and it hailed, and
there was morning dew in the grass. We collected, and then returned to the
soil, 0.78 inches of rain for the second half of April, bringing the farming
total to 2.68 inches for the month. And if you multiply 2.68 inches of rain over
the acres we farm, you will see that we received 2,462,628.85 gallons of water,
depending on your processor.
To give this some perspective,
2.68 inches of rain here on the farm is the equivalent of about a million cases
of wine. See if you can implement your own physical interpretation of that
mental construct. We aren’t psychic, but we do see a corkscrew in your future –
it is very close by.
Until we FLOG again, for most assuredly we will, winegrowers
we remain.
Kindest Regards,
Dena & Ernie
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