The Clones are Coming

We finally made a decision for our initial planting! In September, 2011, we went out to California with the intention of meeting with grapevine nurseries that sell ENTAV clones. One of the nurseries that we went to was Mercier California located in Vacaville. At that time, Sebastian gave us a great tour of the Vacaville facility, including a trip to Woodland to see the ENTAV clones.
We worked with Sebastian and Franco via email. We had a lot of questions because we want to use talls grafts for our initial planting. These tall grafts are an experiment because we believe that it will help us to establish our young vines without subjecting them to unnecessary risk of crown gall. There are places in our area that already use tall grafts such as Rob Russell at Westport Rivers Winery so we will not be the pioneers, which is a good thing. After much deliberation, we went to Vacaville to sign the contract and put in our order for Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, and Auxerrois. We were there to see how Mercier selects their rootstock in the field and Sebastian and Franco showed us how our tall grafts compared with the normal grafts. Our plants will be arriving in the spring of 2013! So much to do to prepare.