In Search of Wine Quality: Part 5 Irrigation

In December, it was my intention to have a series of blogs entitled "In Search of Wine Quality" based on this flow diagram:¹

So far, I have the following blogposts related to this topic:

• In Search of Wine Quality: Vineyard Location
• In Search of Wine Quality: Soil and Water---Part 2
• In Search of Wine Quality: Soil and Water---Part 3
• In Search of Wine Quality: Soil and Water---Part 4

Today, I'm continuing with Irrigation. It is so important that I have an entire Tab dedicated to the topic of Irrigation. We first planted our vineyard in 2013 when we had no irrigation in place. This is really rolling the dice with Mother Nature when expecting new vines to take hold in a foreign location.
When contemplating drilling a well, we found that dowsing is a good way to locate a water source. It is not scientific but it does work and we were able to locate a well on our property that is providing us with 40 gallons/minute.
After locating a source of water, we were engaged in trench digging for our irrigation system. In this blog, Installing our Irrigation, there are two videos that summarizes the activities from November, 2015 until January, 2016.
In May, 2016, we planted 4200 vines to replace the 6000 vines that died in 2014 after our first planting in 2013. 2016 was a dry year that saw virtually no rain from the end of May until the middle of July. After planting our young vines, while we did have the irrigation system in place, we still needed to do additional work (put in the irrigation line to hold the drip irrigation hose, tether the drip irrigation hose to the line, etc, all in sweltering summer weather) to get the water to the young plants. In between all of that work, we did a lot of manual watering of the new plantings until we finally had our irrigation manifold assembly in place and a generator hooked up to the assembly to get water to our vines! Tony, our well driller came to hook up the manifold assembly to the controller and our electrician came to install a power cable to the generator that we had rented and finally, on July 22, we had irrigation in the vineyard. Irrigation: when you need it, it is great to have!

We have 7 zones in the vineyard, so we didn't have to irrigate all the zones at once. We did it in sections and we learned that irrigating at night was better for water conservation. It was a seriously hot summer!

References:
1. D. I. Jackson, P. B. Lombard, Environmental and Management Practices Affecting Grape Composition and Wine Quality - A Review, Am J Enol Vitic., January 1993 44: 409-430; published ahead of print January 01, 1993.