Hello and Welcome,
It is the dormant season in wine country. The first day of spring is not until March 20th, but believe it or not, it is coming up fast. Witness the daffodils and crocus in the garden providing the early, wonderfully colorful signs of agricultural life below ground. This is their one time a year to “rise and shine” brightening up our disposition. And they are certainly a most welcome development, especially this year.
A FLOG communication
(Farming bLOG) by Dena & Ernie from Amalie Robert Estate. Oregon Willamette
Valley Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Have a look and see what we see on Instagram @AmalieRobert Estate.
The vines may appear dormant, but that’s just a disguise. There
is plenty of work being done inside the vine and below ground in the root zone.
Their big day is bud break, and they are making all of the necessary
preparations for the big reveal. And just like you toiling in your garden, it
is our job to get our garden, the “vine-yard” ready to grow. We will begin with
what we can see, and that is the transformation from last year’s canopy to a
new start for vintage 2021.
Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does
your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells and one farming eggplant!
A new start, how refreshing. Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up one
morning and find the to-do list from yesterday is gone? Just GONE! Or the first
day back from vacation (or staycation to the back garden, or vine-yard as the
case may be) and you find that your E-mail file has been corrupted. No old
E-mails. No new E-mails, No follow-up E-mails. No back-ups and no farming
E-mail whatsoever! NONE! Well if you were a vine, spring is just like that. No
hold over from the past vintage to distract you or keep you from your dedicated
purpose – which is to ripen your seeds and reproduce! If only…
They cannot do it alone. Actually they can, they are
self-pollinating. But if left on their own, they just sprawl all over the
ground. Not an ideal situation to produce top quality wine, which is our
dedicated purpose.
So we have implemented a Vertical Shoot Positioning trellis
system in which to manage their development during the growing season. During a
typical harvest, sans smoke taint, we denude the vines of their wine berries
and ferment the sugar out of them. What is leftover is the vertically “hand
positioned” shoots of the prior vintage.
Vertical Shoot Position Trellis with Catch Clip.
Out with
the old, in with the new growth. In preparation for vintage 2021 we have 4 “by
hand” vine related tasks to complete: Removing the trellis wire catch clips,
about 14 seconds per plant, making the primary pruning cuts separating last
year’s cane from the trunk, about 30 seconds per plant, pulling the brush out
of the trellis wires which is the physical equivalent to punch down in the
winery, about 32 seconds per plant. And finally wrapping a new cane on the
fruiting wire that will bear vintage 2021 wine berries, about 70 seconds per
plant. This last task involves the use of a very low-tech bread twist-tie.
Remember those? And then we wait (fixing whatever it is that still needs to be
fixed) just as patiently as farmers do, for bud break.
Primary Cut Separating Last Year's Cane from the Trunk.
Brush Pulled Out of Trellis Wires.
New Cane for 2021 Wrapped on the Fruiting Wire and Tied with a
Green Twist-tie.
In the
vineyard it is true - No passengers, all crew. Ernie works in a little tractor
time between the rain showers when he can. His job is to mow up all the canes
from last year along with the tall fescue (Hey that’s grass, buddy). This mix
of browns and greens puts the worms and soil microbes back to work returning
nutrients to our sedimentary Bellpine soil. Everybody and everything has a job
to do. It takes about 3 tractor passes with the flail mower to fully mulch last
year’s canes into the vineyard floor. About once every 2-3 weeks or so is good
timing due to the grass’s unrelenting spring growth rate.
Canes Ready for Ernie to Mow.
Rust on the
tractor never sleeps and our army of beneficial insects never get a day off.
There are good bugs and there are bad bugs. Good bugs eat the bad bugs that
want to eat our vines. Good bugs are the ever-voracious ladybug, earwig,
various and assorted spiders, and the praying mantis. The praying mantis is a
special case. If you see a piece of straw fluttering in the breeze, watch where
it lands. It could very well be a praying mantis. They are said to be good luck
in a vineyard, unless you are trying to mate with one.
The NUMBER ONE bad bug is the Willamette spider mite. A
subspecies of spider mites, this
particular mite feeds off the vascular tissue of the leaves, thus draining the
life force of the vine. The leaves turn rust colored and significantly reduce
photosynthetic output. The antidote, other than the previously listed good
bugs, is the Predatory mite.
Live Predatory Mites. Get them on
AMAZON. Sold in lots of 2,000, more or less…
Fun Fact: Until relatively recently in the evolution of the
human condition, leeches were thought by some practitioners to provide
medicinal benefits. We now know that not to be true. Wine may or may not provide
medicinal benefits, but from a chemistry point of view, it is a solution.
Here is the odd thing, both mites co-exist simultaneously among
the vines. They both winter over in the bark of the trunks and just before bud
break, they emerge to feed. The Willamette mite tries to eat the buds before
they can burst forth with new life. If there is a significant population and
they succeed in devouring all of the buds on a new cane, the vine could die.
The Predatory mite is our first line of defense against this unwanted activity.
But nobody batts a thousand.
What does that mean, and why should I care? This is an excellent
time to point out that we do not use insecticides in the vineyard. Some wine
growing regions are more prone to insect pressure than others. Due to our
reasonable cold winters, the most harmful species cannot overwinter. The
yellowjacket (and its natural predator, the flame thrower) is an unfortunate
exception. While some chemical companies offer products to eradicate bad mites,
and it is tempting to consider, these products are effective against all mites
– the good, the bad and well they are all kinda ugly. So we let nature take its
course. Each year we see some damage, sometimes more in a very hot and dry
vintage.
And if you happen to see a dirt clod that just flew away, well
then it wasn’t really a dirt clod after all but maybe a well camouflaged small
raptor harvesting up a vineyard vole. Voles, along with pocket gophers do their
business underground. By that we mean they are feasting on the vine’s roots.
Very bad, very very bad!
The vine has no natural defense against such an unprovoked
attack. But the aerial squadron of raptors that we have fostered provide a
first line of defense. From the Enterprise class red-tailed hawk, through the
mid-range Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks down to the Kestrel, they all
contribute to the overall vineyard health, and get fed doing it – so they can
reproduce!
It’s a
bug’s life. The good bugs are out there 24x7 and are constantly “harvesting”
bad bugs. When they can’t find bad bugs (protein), they are on the hunt for
pollen. Pollen is their vegan solution to protein. And that is where our cover
crops from last fall come into play.
We plant winter peas and cereal rye to hold the soil during the
rainy season and also set nitrogen for the vines. Cereal rye takes up nitrogen
and stores it for the spring when it is turned back into the soil as natural
fertilizer. Winter peas are just that, they flower and produce pea pods during
the cold winter months. Somewhere along the way, their program got messed up.
But that is good for us and our battalion of vineyard insects.
Thinking and drinking. About now your left brain is running the
vineyard pruning numbers and trying to determine how long it takes to get
55,000 vines ready for vintage 2021. And your right brain is ready for a little
more wine. If you need some live Predatory mites for
YOUR garden, you can order those from Amazon. No kidding!
PRO Tip: If you have wine in a cup and pretend to blow on it
during your online audio video streaming (Zoom or DUO) session, people may
think it is a cup of hot tea. Either way, tea or wine, it is a “best practice”
to wear pants, in case you spill and need to stand up in a hurry. What you do
on your personal time is your business.
The total elapsed time to complete the “by hand” vineyard
pruning at Amalie Robert Estate is about 2,300 human hours. This estimate is
based on a 4 year moving average that takes into account the vintage and crew
variances in the vineyard. And while this is good to know, it is certainly only
one piece of the puzzle. To put that in perspective, 2,300 human hours is 8 hours
per day for 286 working days. A typical work year is 40 hours a week for 52
weeks, 2,080 hours. Now we are getting somewhere.
Pay it
forward. Pruning can start as soon as all of the leaves have senesced and
fallen to the vineyard floor where they will become nutrients for the next
vintage. The primary pruning cuts can happen independently of the other 3
tasks. However, the other three tasks of removing catch clips, pulling last
year’s canes from the trellis and then wrapping a new cane on the fruiting wire
must occur in sequence. The proof of such is left as an exercise for the
reader.
So, logically, we have one very well experienced and trusted
person making all of the primary pruning cuts in the vineyard. We also have a
small, but dedicated vineyard crew following in sequence performing the
remaining tasks. Ernie’s contribution is to source 55,000 green twist ties.
Dena orders diesel for the tractor. We have already covered the raptor, insect
and cover crop contributions.
Now the big question – how many calendar days do we need in
order to get 286 working days? In a typical office environment, this is 5
working days for every 7 calendar days, excluding holidays, sick days, snow
days, vacation days and now COVID-19 days. The working days are then factored
by adding humans to reduce the elapsed number of days available to accomplish
the work in the time allotted. And after all of that, it’s still farming and we
will still be behind.
Agricultural work is a very unique proposition. Most of the time
we work when we need to and other times we work when environmental conditions
allow. Clearly one supersedes the other. While not a daily occurrence in the
Willamette Valley, we do see snow and freezing temperatures that are not safe
vineyard working conditions. This reduces the potential number of work days by
an unknown factor.
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