FROM VINE TO WINE A Short Guide to Growing and Harvesting Grapes In East County
	MARCH 2005

by Peterangelo Vallis
Photos by Russell Byrne

I’ve been working in vineyards since I was ten years old and making wine since I was eleven. I remember going to my grandfather, an accomplished vintner, and saying, to him, “Papa, I want to make wine.”

“Okay,” he said. You have to do five things:

1. Get some grapes
2. Crush them
3. Add yeast
4. Put the juice in a container
5. Put the container in cool place

“Just let it go and you’ll have wine,” he said.

On the way home I grabbed four bunches of table grapes from a nearby vineyard, which weighed out to about eight pounds of fruit. I washed them, crushed the fruit together with the skins, put the juice in some of my mom’s quart Mason jars, added a pack of Fleishman’s yeast to each jar, put the lids on tight, and put the jars on the cool stones by the fireplace.

Next morning, my mom shook me awake, “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted at me. I got out of bed and made the horrific discovery that my canning jars of wine juice had gone off like flameless Molotov Cocktails and had scattered juice and broken glass all over my ad hoc wine cellar.

Mom made me clean the mess up. After I was finished, she cleaned it up again. (I was only eleven.)

“So I understand you tried to make wine last night,” my grandfather asked me later. “Do you still want to make wine?”

I think my life turned a major corner when I answered, “I sure do!” rather than saying, “No way!” which other, perhaps more bright children, might have answered.

I think the catastrophic results from my first experience as a winemaker illustrates the nature of the industry: It is easy to explain how to make wine, but it takes some trial and error to get it exactly right.

I’m from an Italian family with roots that go back through many generations of wine growers. My family has always had a passion for quality — and has passed down the generations the value of finding joy through doing something as good as it can be done.

I have caught from my ancestors the value of growing grapes for reasons other than simply making money. A person should do this for love or not do it at all.

By connecting with the old traditions and wisdom, knowledge has been passed down to me that our family acquired a long time ago. People ruin vineyards all the time through lack of wisdom that some of the old wine families have known for centuries.

Novice winegrowers can develop their own body of wisdom if they are persistent. Some people, in ignorance, will repeatedly make the same error. There is no reason, however, why they should make any error twice.

Basic knowledge about planting and growing grapes is simple. People who simply remove vanity from the effort and become willing to learn from their mistakes will continually make a better product. Period.

Do You Want to be a Grape Superstar?
On a small scale, anyone can make wine out of good grapes. It takes a supreme winemaker to make good wine out of inferior grapes. Most of us don’t have the training for that, so we have to ensure that our product is good while it is still in the field.

The State of California produces virtually all the grapes used by home winemakers in the rest of the United States, so you should make good product in your back yard. Don’t buy it from a producer — plant your own vines, harvest your own grapes, and make your own wine.

If you grow excellent grapes, you can make wine good enough to drink in your home, share with your friends, or enter for an award or commendation in the state fair.

Here are the steps to growing a vineyard.

Decide on How Much Wine You Want
The first step in starting a vineyard is answering the question, “How much wine do you want to make?” You just work the following backwards: One vine, depending on the size, can produce ten pounds of fruit. It takes 12 pounds of grapes, more or less, to make a gallon of juice, which, in turn produces a 1/2-gallon of wine.

This means that in a corner of your back yard you can make ten gallons of wine. A half-acre planted in vines might yield 200 to 400 gallons. Everyone is allowed 200 gallons of wine for home consumption, so something a little less than a half-acre might be a logical starting point.

Select the Location
Before you plant the first vine, choose a sunny part of your lot. Healthy vines require two things: heat and water. Get some advice from an expert about the kind of grapes that will be suited to the quality of your soil, whether it is sandy, clay, or loamy.

Remember that grapes will grow anywhere. As long as they have access to lots of sunshine and water, you can grow a vineyard on rocks.

Select the Vine and Rootstock
Most vines are grafted onto some sort of specific rootstock. An important set of choices, therefore, is of the right rootstock to use for your vines, and then the choice of the vines that will be graphed to it. Hundreds of rootstocks are available, together with thousands of clones for the varietals to graph to each one.

You can buy vines already graphed onto the root stock type appropriate for your drainage, soil type, and spacing need.

Get someone to check out your place and help you make the selection. You have to prioritize the characteristics of your property and your own goals and wishes as you make your choice.

The next choice is the varietal of vines best suited to the conditions of the area where you are going to plant them. You might need a strong, vigorous vine depending on the type of microclimate in your back yard.

For example, a Grenache is a strong, vigorous vine. Another robust vine is Barbera.

Cabernet Sauvignon is a medium vigor vine. Zinfandel is a medium to a high vigor vine depending on the root system. Pinot Noir is a low vigor vine.

The characteristics of all of these vines can be raised or lowered depending upon rootstocks.

Prepare the Ground and Irrigation
You have to clear the ground, either making it flat or grading a uniform slope on any side hills that are present in the land where you are going to put your vineyard. Your aim is consistency — ensuring that all parts of the property receive the same sun, water, and nutrients so that each part of the vineyard produces product of the same consistency as all other parts.

After the vines are selected and the ground prepared, you must choose the irrigation system. The type of system you will require depends upon the type of soil and the type of vine. Also, depending upon the size of your vineyard, you will choose to install a real irrigation system or use an elementary hose system.

For appropriately sized vineyards, I typically set up commercial-quality irrigation systems, with automatic water distribution capabilities.

Now you are ready to plant your vineyard, which basically consists of sticking the vine in the ground and then letting it grow. Plan to enjoy the next two years as you watch your vines begin sending root systems down into the ground and strong shoot systems up into the sunshine.

Fertilize
Mature vines seem almost indestructible, but for the first two years after planting they require monitoring and care. You will need to fertilize the plants, providing such supplements as nitrogen, macronutrients, CO2, phosphorus, and sulfur — essentially the same fertilizers as you would use for your garden.

Make sure that the irrigation system is working properly. You should also apply the fertilizer at regular intervals.

Train the Vines
The other thing you want to do is to train your vines. This is an area where you can give free reign to your creative urges.

What do you want your vineyard to look like? Do you want it to be cool and angular, like the elegant vineyards you see on TV? Or do you want vines to look more like bushes?

You spend the first two years of a vineyard’s life training the vines to the appearance you want. It’s hard to get this part wrong, since you really can train a vine to look like almost anything you want. If you are doing this in your backyard, you can train the vines into more ornamental, topiary shapes that look like sculpture in the winter!

Nothing you do to the vines in this way will alter the growth of the grapes.

The important thing about training your vines is to get the fruit off the ground in order to have good quality grapes, because grapes like to hang. It is good to keep the air moving around the growing grapes. Hanging in the fresh air helps protect the fruit from their number one pest, which is mildew. Fruit that becomes mildewed also becomes vulnerable to many other problems.

Maintain Your Plants
Once your vineyard is planted and growing, there are four things you need to do:

1. Prune the vines every winter
2. Fertilize the plants on a regular basis
3. Water the plants
4. Dust the plants with sulfur

Sulfur dust provides additional protection against mildew. Sulfur dust is innocuous until it gets wet, and then it smells like rotten eggs. Sulfur dust is organic and safe to use.

It doesn’t matter how you apply sulfur dust to the plants. You can buy hand-held dusters or get it in a liquid form and spray it on the vines. If you have a small vineyard you can simply apply it using a bag made out of cheesecloth.

For best protection against mildew, make regular applications of sulfur dust to your plants during the first 2/3 of the growing season — from late April or early May through the middle of July. Do this once every couple weeks, or so.

You don’t have to do this, but regular applications of sulfur will help ensure the quality of your grapes at harvest time.

Year three you have a crop. Not a full crop, perhaps 30 to 50 percent, depending upon vine and weather.

Pick the Fruit When it is Perfectly Mature
When the fruit is mature, you get to pick the grapes, which is the best part of the process, I think.

Choosing the perfect moment for harvesting your crop is a matter of judgment. There are a number of characteristics that determine when the time is right for harvest:

• The most obvious characteristic is color, which is the evident outward indication of ripeness.
• The most important characteristic of the developing product is the presence of sugar, which is easy to determine. Do the grapes taste sweet to the tongue?
• Another quality you are looking for is the balance between sugar and acid. You can buy simple PH kits to test the juice for this. As they ripen, your grapes will move away from total acidity towards the ideal balance.
• A less-obvious but very important quality is pulp, which contains the nutrients that provide a good, round taste. What you are looking for is a natural balance between pulp, juice, and skin. The ideal is a plump grape, full of pulp, and succulent syrupy juice.

Taste is the ultimate test for the readiness of your grapes for harvest. You have to train yourself to tell you when the product is ripe. This isn’t science, because only your trained palate can tell you when the grape is ready for harvest.

Get a professional, if you can, to come by and sample the grapes for you the first couple of harvests.

From Grape to Glass
Grapes are fascinating. I’ve eaten grapes from all over the state. My favorite wine is a Zinfandel, which provides a wonderful taste, and is full of complexity. In inferior Zinfandels you can’t taste the grape. That diminishes the enjoyment of the glass of wine for somebody whose palate has been trained to recognize quality. In a truly good wine you can taste the nutrients, which have a taste that goes beyond wine, sugar, and pulp. You can actually taste the fruit itself.

Wine grapes have a different taste than table grapes. The taste of the grape should persevere through the processes of harvesting and bottling. Together the grower and the wine maker can fine-tune the processes between harvest and bottling to maintain the echo of the original fruit.

Vintners are chemists. You can carry out the processes of crush and fermentation just as though you were conducting a science experiment. All you need is a vat, a few feet of tubing, and a container to hold it in when the process is finished.

After all, making wine is an ancient art, and people were doing this many years before reading and writing were common skills. You can make wine with rudimentary equipment. You can make it in a clean garbage can, for example — and many amateur winemakers do exactly that! A stainless steel drum is better.

You need a wine press or crusher, a fermentation vat, and a way to get the wine into the bottle. After that you simply cap the bottle.

Fresh wine is great and is especially excellent to cook with and to serve with food.

Now you have all you need to make wine, all you need to supply is the good grapes from your vineyard.

Just Do it!
You can plant a vineyard without knowing any more than I told you in this article. You will learn by trial and error and in a decade or so of diligent work you’ll have a vineyard to be proud of.

You can save some time if you buy a video or a book. I didn’t, so I consumed ten years in trial and error-based experiences to learn the lessons I needed.

However, if you want to flatten that learning curve, feel free to give me a ring. Planting new vineyards is my life; for everyone else it is a daunting task.

I’ll come visit you, have a cuppa coffee. If you want, we’ll talk about your lifestyle and goals. Are you going to have a half-acre, someday? Thirty acres? How much do you want to spend?

I’ll give you information, advice, and help you down to the level you need it. Together we’ll take measurements and soil tests. We’ll examine your space and select the ideal location. You could take it from there.

Do you want me to design your vineyard? Build the vineyard? Sell excess grapes for you?

The ground and climate in East County is amazing. I can help people put some award-winning products together. A vineyard usually lends a lovely, rural feel to a family home site. There are a number of reasons for doing this.

I have a calling to supply things that give people pleasure. I find that wine and the lifestyle that it can provide to be the most rewarding of all.

Peterangelo Vallis
Vineyard Consultation Design & Management
559-905-7748
559-897-4012 (fax)
peterangelo@sbcglobal.net
2540 W. Paul, Fresno, CA 93711