Winter
It’s very tempting to stay indoors and let our wood-burning stove keep us warm and comfortable….and we will be doing some of that, for sure. But there’s also work to do. We’ll fertilize the soil, prune the vines, replace dead or dying vines (up to 5% per year), and keep an eye out for frost. Finally, this is the season of maintenance — repairing fence posts, drip systems, and more.
revitalizing soil
As the vines grow roughly 21 tons of grapes through the spring and summer, they absorb many of the nutrients in the soil. Our job in winter is to bring the soil back to life.
That means fertilizing, but fertilizing is a delicate matter. It’s easy to over-fertilize, which induces too much growth in the vines — ie, longer wooden stems and more leaves. More growth may sound like a good thing, but it actually brings a number of problems. The first is that ultra growth can impart a “vegetative” taste to the grapes…they actually taste a little bit like vegetables, which is not what we want!
Too many leaves and wood from long stems also means the plant commits energy to grow and maintain them, where as we want it spending energy on growing fruit.
Finally, if the soil is too rich, the vines actually fruit less, not more. Fruiting is the vine’s attempt to reproduce, to spread its DNA for safe keeping. But when the vines encounter an over-abundance of nutrients, then the need to fruit isn’t as pressing, and they produce fewer grapes.
Our job is to hit the sweet spot of soil revitalization: just enough to support a bounty of fruit, but no more. Over the years, we’ve developed an approach that works well...
Organic Compost
We use an organic compost that we stack at the base of each vine. It’s a simple blend of green debris material such as grasses, leaves and such, with care to remove added fertilizers or other contaminants. We do this for each of our 2,307 vines. As it rains (a lot) during winter, the nutrients in the compost seep into the soil, giving each vine a reservoir of energy. They’ll slowly soak up the nutrients and convert them to carbohydrates that they’ll use to spark new growth in the spring.
Cover Crops
Our second fertilizing technique is to plant cover crops on every other row of the vineyard. The crops look like random weeds right now (albeit growing in a straight line), but they’re are handpicked for their ability to release large amounts of nitrogen into the soil. We’ll let the cover crops grow until April or May. By that time, the soil will have all the nitrogen it needs, at which point we’ll plow the plants back into the soil, where they’ll become another dose of organic fertilizer for the vines to draw on.
pruning vines
After spring and summer, the vine stems typically stretch six feet in each direction along their trellis, and multiple smaller stems (aka ‘shoots’) have branched off from their parents. It’s a big tangle of wood.
Our job in winter is to prune all of this annual growth back to nearly zero. We do this because it helps the vine get started again when it comes out of hibernation in early spring. Once pruned, it no longer has to expend energy supporting a big infrastructure of wood and leaves from the start. We give it less work to do, a chance to save energy early on, which leads to even more growth in the long run.
