Grape growing throughout the world is a challenging endeavor.  Grapevines, being a perennial plant, are not replanted from year to year and this has implications for the farmer.  Annual crop rotation is a good pest management tool.  Those bugs and diseases that attack last year’s crop might not thrive as well with this year’s planting.  You keep shifting the ground beneath the critters and they don’t  go forth so easily and multiply.

Pest management is one challenge to growing perennial grapevines; the weather, specifically the winter (which we in the Finger Lakes have in spades), is another.  Grapevines have to ride out the winter as best they can.  Generally the varieties planted can withstand fairly harsh winter conditions, but each variety has a different level of cold tolerance.  While it is hard to kill a grapevine, it is easy to make them unproductive.  Cold weather, specifically sub-zero weather, can damage grape buds, and the shoots, leaves and most importantly the fruit emerge from these buds.

One of the tasks we perform in the winter is pruning.  Most of the growth from the previous year is pruned away, leaving (hopefully) fruitful buds that produce a crop that is small enough to ripen for high quality wine and large enough to be economically viable. Before we prune though, we assess the vineyard for winter injury, specifically we test bud mortality.

To determine whether a bud is live or not we have to take a representative sample of canes throughout the vineyard and test the buds on each one.  We do this by cutting the bud horizontally with a razor (top picture).  The razor cut exposes the bud and we can visually see if it is alive or dead.  The second picture below is a picture of a live bud and the bottom one is a picture of a dead primary bud (black) and a live secondary bud (the vibrant, green, crescent below it). We then compare the number of live and dead buds and prune the vineyard accordingly.  If there are 25% dead buds and the vineyard is pruned to leave 60 buds/vine or four 15-bud canes, we leave an extra 25%.  In other words we prune a vine with an extra 15 buds/vine, which works out to four 20-bud canes.

There is science to pruning but there is also art and just as importantly, commerce.  These bud mortality numbers are an important parameter to keep in mind but the art comes in, as our winemaker, Jim Zimar says, by looking at what the vine is telling you.  Four 20-bud canes will be a starting point but every vine is different.  If a grapevine has four canes that are as thick as a man’s thumb, then the person pruned that vine too heavily and, conversely he or she left too many buds, if those four canes are spindly and weak.  The science only provides guidelines. The pruner’s art is recognizing how and where those guidelines fall within the individual vine’s growth and commerce wants that recognition to be expeditious.

Grapevines care nothing (if they care at all) about commerce, art or science. They have evolved a complex bud system with primary, secondary and tertiary buds to ensure their survival.  The secondary and tertiary buds are not as fruitful as the primary buds.  The grapevine won’t produce much, if any fruit if the primary buds are killed but, the secondary and tertiary buds, if they survive, will ensure that the vine stays alive and able to pass along its DNA in a another year.    Ultimately, that is the only thing a grapevine cares about, making other grapevines.

Jim Zimar tests vignoles buds for winter injury

An example of a live vignoles bud.

A dead primary and a live secondary bud below

I’ve always been a fan of Macbeth.                            

The coldest day of the winter, so far.  We dodged a bullet.  That is steam coming off the lake.

Steam rising off of Seneca

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams

Several years ago on a July 4^th week-end, a couple came into the winery and told me how they wanted to retire to a winery and wanted to know what the downsides were. I looked at them and without skipping a beat pointed out to them that this holiday week-end, on this bright, warm and sunny Independence Day, I was working and they were not. Romance was now staggering and bloodied and wobbling on the mat. People, listen and listen good, you don’t retire to a winery. You retire to a golf course. You retire to a fishing pole. If you want to retire to a winery and have a fishing pole, I have the perfect lake for you to lose it in. You may as well let some archeologist get some pleasure out of it a thousand years from now because God knows you won’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I love wine and I love making wine but it is a business, a very competitive business and a much regulated business. Nothing takes the shine off romance like regulation (unless of course you’re a republican).

Get out of the way!

Heavy metal

If you’re smart you a run your business as lean as you can which brings us to these lovely photographs. A winery and vineyard and Prejean winery is no exception, is first and foremost a farm. People often overlook this reality. We farm for flavor, we farm for quality over quantity, but a vineyard still is a farm. When you drive heavy equipment over rough rocky ground things break and usually have to be fixed quickly. There generally isn’t a piece of equipment that you don’t want or need or can afford. Art Hunt, owner of Hunt Country Vineyards, commented at a meeting that I attended(with a democrat running for governor of NY whose ideas of romance actually required much more regulation….as an independent I’m certainly even-handed) that certain wine regions farm with money, we, in the Finger Lakes farm for money.

If you farm for money you’re going to have to save money by buying used equipment or fabricating your own. This snow plow is a perfect example. We’re blessed at Prejean winery with gifted mechanics. Todd Saltsman, our vineyard manager, fabricated the tractor mount for this used plow which we bought from Bully Hill Vineyards where Todd’s father works. Even with the labor and other parts it could easily pay for itself this year. The plow isn’t pretty but will save money, functions and from a business perspective that makes it beautiful.

As mundane as all this sounds it is all part of running a winery. People, both employees and customers, have to be able to drive up our driveway.

It is easy to overlook the ordinary. We do it every day, all day long. But if you look close at something as commonplace as this plow it reveals a complexity that belies this idea of ordinariness. There is an interlocking web of connections, experience and craft sitting on that concrete floor and a vitality too easily dismissed; an ordinary thing on which so much depends.

By rights there should be a few beasts out there with pruning shears.

Here are a couple of shots from the winery.

Did I mention that it is warm inside?

A view from Prejean Winery's front door.

A view from the north side of Prejean Winery

I was amazed that this owl let me get this close.  This shot is probably only about 20ft away.  I was stumbling around so much in the mucky, muddy snow that it must have felt that its perch on the  vineyard post was probably safe.

A view from the vineyard

Ernest Hemingway

Well, I now have this to look forward to.

If you face east out into the darkness, this fall morning shows your tired eyes, little of the landscape. The birds, beginning to sing, are perched somewhere in the space before and on either side on dark blotches of formlessness.  The sun begins to reach over the hills across the expanse and abruptly fractures into shards of orange and gold.  The wind, and there is always wind, begins to dance with shadows.

The forms of treetops are the first born, standing 60 feet tall or so and a quarter mile away. They are in a grove of trees that decades previous had humbly began as a hedgerow and is now, slowly growing back into forest.  The sun rises higher and boundaries emerge, uneven geometries that corral a length of shadow.  Slowly, outlines appear, the daubes of night fade and the sunrise glides upon a field.  Forms of posts emerge, and the glint of wire.

There is movement now, a dance of wind and golden green.  You can see the texture of bark lashed to the wire.  The birdsong, which had been growing louder, suddenly is overwhelmed by the clatter of a diesel engine.  Looking back you see grapes, golden and translucent mostly, but not all.  This vineyard isn’t quite ready to pick.  Seneca is visible before you, textured with whitecaps on dark blue cobalt.  The lake is why this vineyard is here.

The harvester is warm and you are ready to follow it down the lengths of rows past vines and grapes and under overhanging canes.  The leaves on the vines sway in the sun and as the day progresses and warms, they begin to gather light.

Wine is about geography.  It is about earth, water and toil.  It is about people, history and commerce and it is about light.  Hopefully, this blog will shed some. Though, the word ‘shed’ implies that is there is light already present and I can’t make that presumption.  Perhaps I’ll reveal and sometimes, though hopefully not often, distort.  At the very least I’ll chronicle what life is like at our winery.

It is winter and things are quieting down.  Not much to report, so you’re stuck with my philosophizing.

Poor you.