One of our Winter jobs is replacing dying or dead vines that have succumbed to old age, disease, or gophers. We have roughly 2,300 Syrah vines in the vineyard (spaced six feet apart, with fruiting arms about six feet long), and typically replace up to 5% of our vines each year. But this year is different.

Ultimately, we’re planning to more than double the vineyard’s Syrah vine count (we’ll explain why in a future post), and move to a three foot spacing between vines, with fruiting arms of three feet. So we’ve just purchased about 1,000 new vines for planting this year. 

The new vines are not native Syrah vines, however. The roots of all European vines — Syrah, Pinot, Cabernet, and so on — are highly vulnerable to a devastating pest called Phylloxera. In fact, in the late 1800s, many European vineyards were destroyed by Phylloxera, which had recently appeared on the continent. Fortunately, desperate European vintners discovered that the roots of wild American grape vines were resistant to Phylloxera, and so they began to graft their vines onto that American root stock. Today the majority of grape vines planted in the world are planted on a Phylloxera-resistant root stock (many of which still derive from the American wild grape) and our vines are no different. 

Half of the 1,000 vines we purchased have already been grafted with Syrah by Grey Creek Nurseries in Healdsburg, CA. We call these “bench grafted” vines, and you can custom order the roots and grafted vines with different characteristics. For our root stock, we chose 1103P, which has high Phylloxera resistance, medium-to-high drought resistance, while also coping with wet soil well. And for the Syrah that’s grafted on top, we chose clone 877, which has a strong tannic grip to the mid-palate and is well suited to our climate and soil. We’ll plant these bench-grafted vines by mid-March. 

The rest of our purchase is just the simple, disease-resistant root stock (1103P). We’ll plant these roots in March as well, but will wait until summer before grafting Syrah to them.  We preferred to buy all our vines already grafted, but there’s just not enough supply to fulfill a big order like our’s.