New Grape Growers and the NRCS

It has been two years since we met with Javier Cruz from the NRCS. We followed the steps in order to become eligible for assistance from the National Resources Conservation Services. We formed a Limited Liability Company in July 2012, and in July 2013, we were awarded a grant to help us with the irrigation of our vineyard. My husband did much of the "leg work" by mapping out the output of the wells in our area. He retrieved this information available online via the ftp server at the Connecticut State Department of Consumer Protection under "well drilling records". He also learned what types of materials and construction was involved in well drilling and then we interviewed well drillers in our area this past spring. All of this prior work was enough to allow us an extension on our grant and Garrett Timmons from our local NRCS, scheduled a meeting with Civil Engineer, Dan Pietro on our property. So, on July 24th, Garrett, Dan and Eric came to visit us at our vineyard. My husband is showing them the grape hoe that will help us weed in the vine row.

Dan and Eric walked parts of the vineyard with us and looked at places where the well could be located. Of course, the well will be where there is water, but the records that my husband retrieved indicated that there is a source of good water in our area, exactly where that would be on our land is still to be determined.
Eric took some GPS coordinates around our property. Later in the day, my husband sent Dan a diagram of where our tiling lines were in the vineyard. We will need to contact one of the well drillers that we interviewed to set up a date for the well drilling.
One of our takeaway learnings from our first year with vines is that the young vines really need a reliable source of water. When we planted last May, we did have a bolus of water that came with tropical storm Andrea on June 6th, but the rest of the summer was very dry. We hope that we are now on track for having the well and irrigation system in place for planting our vineyard "take two".

Pinotage and Blessing of the Mancave

This past weekend was the annual Blessing of the Fleet in Stonington, Connecticut, but on Long Pond, Ledyard there was another blessing taking place. If you are a member of the filming crew, you will have access to this type of structure which was officially named on Saturday, during the Blessing of Barry's Mancave.

The Blessing of the Mancave was accompanied by the consuming of grilled, butterflied leg of lamb, grilled corn, sweet potato salad, arugula salad, cold zucchini soup, shrimp cocktail and copious amounts of wine and champagne. One of the wines that stood out due to it's novelty was something that Barry had while filming the British Open. It was called Barista and it is made from the Pinotage grape from South Africa. I drank it with a lot of curiosity because I learned about Pinotage in the U.C. Davis online wine certification course but had never had the opportunity to taste it. Pinotage is a a cross between Pinot noir and Cinsaut known as "Hermitage" in South Africa. It had a deep purple color and the taste was pleasing. If given to me in a blind taste test, I would not be able to identify it as Pinotage. We had a delightful evening capped off with the most scrumptious fresh cherry pie and pecan pie. I say, the Blessing of Barry's Mancave should also become an annual event!

Vine Down: Lessons Can Be Learned

It is always a hazardous thing to bring a wheeled line trimmer into the vineyard to get rid of weeds under the vine and I unfortunately, brought down a healthy looking vine in row 14. In minutes, the leaves appeared to lose turgor pressure and seemed to shrivel up. The next day, the vine looked totally desiccated, in other words, brown and dead.
We took this opportunity to carefully dig the plant up to inspect the root system. The soil appeared to be only moderately moist. The last soaking rain that we had was on July 15th and 16th and that amounted to approximately 1/2-inch. The root system was still in the orientation that the laser planter had placed them in, when the vines were being planted in the trench. There were a few signs of new root growth.

Our realization is that the problem with our dead vineyard goes deep, as in soil deep, but one of the components that can help growth of a young vine is...water. Last year, after planting our vines in late May, we had a deluge of rain from tropical storm Andrea on June 6th and then just spotty rain until August 9th! This is in an area that expects to get an average of 4-inches of rain a month. One of the things that we need is a well and irrigation. (Stay tuned for this blog post.) In order to get the irrigation part correctly implemented, we need to get our line posts and trellis wire in. We now feel that the trellis is key, may even trump laser planting. So, do we get all the trellis material in the ground and then hand plant? That is the question we're grappling with these days.

Count of Live Plants

Last week, Mary helped us to count the number of live plants that we have. We have done this count before. The last time that we did it was about a month ago. We do have a few more plants that have sent up shoots. The distribution of live plants is interesting but also a little puzzling, so I decided to graph it. We have 36 rows of vines, so the graph shows the number of rows as the x-axis and the y-axis shows the number of live plants in that row. The colors on the graph designate the number of vines that are in the south third, middle third and the north third. Since our rows are arranged in a rectangle, the top of the graph is north and the other compass directions are indicated on the graph:

The graph shows that there are far more vines located in the southern portion of our vineyard and far more vines located in the western portion of our vineyard. What does that really look like? Here is the view from the middle of the field looking southwest:

Here is the view from the middle of the field looking southeast:

The plants that are the most prolific are the Chenin blanc. The west and east sides of our field are planted to Auxerrois and Chardonnay. They have not fared well. We are trying to determine why this might be so.

Postmodern Winemaking

Our son-in-law who is visiting from Hawaii, gave us this book as a joint birthday gift. I've just started reading it and it is proving to be very interesting. The book is written by Clark Smith, who founded Vinovation. In the preface to the book, Clark Smith acknowledges people who have influenced his life's trajectory. He attended MIT and references D.S.Kemp (Chemistry). Hey! I thought, I know D.S. Kemp, so immediately, there was a bit of bonding going on and I opened my mind to read what Clark Smith had to say.
I just started reading this book, so stay tuned for a better review of Postmodern Winemaking in a future blog.

Thiery Triolet Champagne

What better way to celebrate a one year old birthday of grandson Jameson, who flew all the way from Hawaii with his parents, than to toast this event with Thiery Triolet Champagne with oysters! The Triolet is a récoltant-manipulant, a grower-producer.
In this case, it wouldn't have mattered what the champagne was, it was a very auspicious occasion which was shared by Jameson's mother and her sister, husband, daughter, son, and Jameson's father.
My husband enjoyed the Triolet because he liked the small bubbles, the hint of creaminess and the nice balance of acidity.

Help is Always Welcomed

Our friend Mary, brought her niece Charlotte and Charlotte brought her friend Anna to help us in the vineyard this past Saturday.

There are always things to do. On that day, Charlotte and Anna helped to catch more Japanese beetles to add to the collection of beetles for making beetlejuice. It might be my fervent hope or, it appears that there are far fewer Japanese beetles this year than there were last year. Charlotte thought that the Japanese beetles were really quite beautiful, and I agree, but in large numbers, they are very destructive. I've also noticed that the wild grape vines in our area are not infested with Japanese beetles. Somehow the beetles tend to gravitate toward wine grapes---what's up with that?
While I was showing Charlotte and Anna how to catch the beetles, Mary went to help my husband pick up rocks from the last 2 vineyard rows! That is one huge task that we can check off! Later, my husband asked me why I didn't come to pick up rocks after showing the girls how to catch beetles in soapy water. Hmmm......
Thanks Mary, Charlotte and Anna!

Rears Pak Spray

Our aspirational sprayer is the one sold by Hans at H&W Equpment for Vineyard and Winery, a 2 Row LIPCO Recycling Tunnel Sprayer.

There are many advantages of the 2 row LIPCO sprayer, and for us one huge disadvantage. First the advantages:

• It conserves the amount of spray being used
• It will do two rows at once
• It has little drift and directs the spray onto the vines
• It is not as noisy as a fan spray

The one huge disadvantage for us, at the moment is that the LIPCO sprayer is an order of magnitude more expensive than what we can afford.

In the beginning, we began by using Birchmeier backpack sprayers. My husband bought one and we took turns using it and then decided that two would be better and faster for covering the entire vineyard. The price is approximately $300.00 for the sprayer and it can hold 4 gallons of spray. An aside: 1 gallon of liquid is approximately 8 pounds therefore, to carry a full backpack with 4 gallons is carrying 32 pounds! Let's just say that 32 pounds is a little bit too heavy for me. When using any spraying equipment, we wear our Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), glasses, appropriate gloves, and mask. Having embraced the need to spray fungicides, we have graduated from the Birchmeier to a PAK Tank boom sprayer. In early June, Doug, from Oesco, Inc. delivered the sprayer we ordered and gave us detailed instructions on how to hook it up to our tractor and how to adjust the spray nozzle.

We have used the sprayer twice now and it is a real time and energy saver. The vines that managed to grow after the 2013-2014 growing season, that constitutes our big learning opportunity are faring very well. I need to do a count of our plants soon, but the hardy vines were mainly Chenin blanc. We feel that there may be a difference in our soil, especially the soil pH that has lead to a rather Gausiann like distribution of survivors in our vineyard as we look at our vineyard rows from south to north. We plan to take some soil samples and have them analyzed. In the mean time, there are more rocks to pick, weeds to wack, lineposts to pound, and bug patrol to do.

Cool Vineyard Sightings

Recently, perched on one of our dead vines, we saw this Sphinx moth. Last year, I blogged about the caterpillar stage of this moth, Eumorpha pandorus. The caterpillar stage is a voracious eater of grapevine leaves so we were also handpicking the caterpillars off our vines. I did take one home to raise it, only to learn that when the caterpillar is ready to pupate, it seeks a pile of leaves to burrow into the soil, so my husband drew the line at having a bottle filled with soil and leaves in our home and when I let the caterpillar go, it was only too happy to find itself on solid ground. We must have left at least one caterpillar untouched such that this beautiful Sphinx moth was what we saw.

As we do our bug patrol, there are many beneficial insects that we see along with the Japanese beetles. Here is a Big-eyed Elater also called the Eyed Click Beetle, Alaus oculatus. According to the Beneficial Insects in the Garden Website, the larval forms of this click beetle is a great predator of noxious wood-boring larvae, including those of wood-boring beetles. Now, if we could only find a natural predator of the Japanese beetles, (besides me, of course), we would be all set.

Beetlejuice

They, those pesky Japanese beetles are back like clockwork, but not in the numbers that we saw last year. I absolutely hate the thought of using pesticides so I'm back in the vineyard collecting the bugs by hand. My husband will tell you that I take a particular delight in trapping the Japanese beetles in my container of soapy water. I blogged last year that this method works because the soapy water creates a film that covers the beetle's spiracles, the way they breathe. The beetles are particularly active during the warm, humid weather that we have been having, but because they are in search of a mate, they are very easy to catch. Their natural instinct is to "play dead" and drop to the ground, so my container is there is catch them and then I quietly say, "Thank you for dropping in." After two days worth of catching beetles, this is what I have:

I found a link that explains how to take care of Japanese beetles:¹

• Larkspur – Japanese beetle will avoid larkspur as much as possible because larkspur will be toxic to them and will cause harm to their body. Thus, you can always plant some larkspur around your crops that are subject to Japanese beetle infestation.
• Herbs Scent – Using herbs to repel insects is a technique widely used in vegetable gardening. Herbs like smartweed and geraniums work wonders when it comes to Japanese beetle control.
• Japanese beetle traps attract the beetles into confinement by releasing pheromones of opposite sex and fake flower scent.
• Natural insecticides that you can use are rotenone, sabadilla and pyrethrum.

Our friends, the Holmbergs have mentioned that the Japanese beetle traps are not effective because the pheromones just lure more Japanese beetles into an area already infested with the critters. As I go up and down our vineyard rows I wonder if there is an anti-pheromone that these beetles release to warn their brethren that there is danger in these here parts. But, I can see that they are engaged in only one activity and that is in increasing their numbers. Once in a while, when a beetle flies away they do emit a sound that seems like a warning to the other beetles.
When I pick the beetles off the grape leaves, the following verse goes through my head:
          I said, Hey! You! Get off of my vine
          Hey! You! Get off of my vine
          Hey! You! Get off of my vine
          Don't hang around 'cause you'll lose your life
          On my vine, beetle.
Reference:
1. Betty Allen, Japanese Beetles.

2013 Chateau de la Chesnaie Muscadet

Happy Fourth of July! If you are in search of a good summer quaffer, I recommend this inexpensive, but very delicious Muscadet. I was of the opinion that Muscadet was a cloyingly sweet wine. I don't know when and how I formed that opinion, but this Chateau de la Chesnaie is a crisp white wine with citrus notes that is a nice wine to sip after a sweaty day in the vineyard.
Today, we are enjoying a respite from working in the vineyard courtesy of Hurricane Arthur bringing us some much needed water.

Winter Injury in the Northeast in 2014

I received the Appellation Cornell - News from Cornell's Viticulture and Enology Program, at the end of June and it had a very timely article written by Tim Martinson in Grapes 101 called Managing Winter-Injured Vines.
The July issue of Wines & Vines also contained an article written by Tony Wolf about Recovering from Cold Injury in Virginia. I read both of the articles with interest because of what we are seeing in our own vineyard.
From both articles, I learned that we are not out of the woods yet with the vines that are currently growing in our vineyard.

• We may still see collapse of some vines that have gone through bud break and begun to develop a canopy due to damage of the regenerative vascular cambium tissue
• We may see an increased incidence of crown gall due to trunk splitting

Both articles provided the following guidance:

• Avoid nitrogen fertilization for this season and consider sowing a cereal under the trellis to provide some competition and reduce shoot vigor
• Re-evaluate your training system and make decisions about what should be done differently based on plant survival patterns in the vineyard
• Keep existing plants healthy in order to produce fruitful buds next year
• Rethink varietal planting scheme and replant the block with a variety that is more cold hardy