One of the most frequent vineyard questions people ask is how warm winters and springs affect the budding grapevines.
The Vitis vinifera that makes up most of the European grape varieties you have ever heard of are not as “spring sensitive” as the local flora of America. We graft those familiar European grapes onto a distinctly more Americanized rootstock, however. Vitis ripiria, V. rupestris, and V. berlandieri were hybridized with V. vinifera for the past century to give the grapes a resistance to insects and disease below the soil. Still, in Virginia USA, our grapevines do not wake up as early as the blackberry bushes and pear trees.

In two decades, I have never seen my grapevines bud out before the first day of spring. The first week of April is the norm, but for those of you who want an easier gauge to remember, look for the east coast Redbud trees blooming purple-red as the more accurate indicator the grapevines are also budding out.

Why do we care? Because the grape-clusters-to-be are already inside those little buds. Once the buds break, a cold snap or frost can kill them, and their potential grape crop. Very bad for your winery’s volume. It increases the cost of your bottle of wine.

Why do they bud out? Warm soil gets the roots pumping water – transpiration – up the trunk, out the arms, and to the canes. Water pressure. The warmer it gets in spring, the higher the pressure. That pressure first swells the buds bigger, then helps them erupt with a set of leaves. This pressure is greatest at the very ends of the canes, so the buds the farthest from the roots break out first. But not all the buds break out down the cane. The first breaking buds release a hormone called auxin that inhibits the next lower bud. After six or seven buds, all the lower buds don’t break out much at all. Left to themselves, the grape clusters would only form on the ends of the vines. In the wilds, before we domesticated them, these would be the vines that had grown the tallest up other trees and brush. The grapes would then ripen up in the sun where the birds could see them. Quite often in the ancient world, docked trees would keep the grapes off the ground and away from wildlife, livestock, and hungry children. The typical visual of an overgrown grapevine covered pergola has a basis in this fact. We pesky farmers needed grapes where they were easier to tend in a modern vineyard.

So, we prune the grapevine canes back to just a few buds every winter. Now the buds that break in spring are right by the trunk and arms in a range where it is easier to concentrate our sprays, energy, and labor to tend them.

Many trees and plants have a sap that can heal wounds like a scab. Grapevines do not.

With the root’s water pressure of a warming spring, our grapevines pump out water through the xylem tubes to the buds. But we’ve severed that cane, and the sleeping vine of winter did not seal it off. The cut vine begins to drip water in the coming spring. We call it weeping. If the vigneron stupidly makes big cuts on a vine, it can easily “weep” to death. When done right, this weeping is more tears of joy. The vines are awakening. The new season is beginning. The grapes are coming.

On this first day of spring, I thought you might like to see what a walk through the vineyard shows. Some of us have been working from home for decades. Our home office is just a little different than others.

May all the pressure you feel at this odd moment in an arriving warm spring, and all the tears for the loss we all share, remind us we’ll grow through this pain and past this hurt. We always have.

(me in Virginia Tech vineyard seminar) “I adore pruning.”

(young fellow student in class ) “Yeah, sure. Numb fingers in the freezing cold, the canes thwapping you in the face. You’ll come to hate it soon enough.”

(me) “I’ve been pruning for twenty years. When do you think this hate will kick in?”

Pruning is one of the most wonderful times in the vineyard. It is quiet. The world leaves you alone in peace. Each vine gets its own moment of love, its few minutes of focused study, bare naked of leaf and bug and sweat distractions. It is part forensic (why did you die?), part medicine (trim out the weak, favor the strong) and part zen philosophy (How do we wish to grow in life, vine?)

For a boy who wanted to run away and live on an island, then discovered you really can’t, the vineyard in winter is pretty dang close.

Sheets of clouds are the winter norm. The big fluffy cumulus are not as common. The sheets of ice and snow seem to match the sky.

Once you have sized up the vine, the routine is pruner clipping, which are like small by-pass lobbers. It is hard to believe how they used to use saws for this task.

 

Your mind wanders. Thumb on cordant, 2 buds, snip. Put the canes in the trailer. Rewrite those two sentences again. This imagery would work there. What are that character’s motivations? Why would they do it that way, it wasn’t one of the emotional markers I had assigned to them. Better to have the other character suggest that.

Next vine.

 

Getting dark. Park the tractor & trailer. Time for chicken soup, grilled cheese, and a St. Emilion beside the woodstove at the writing desk for the evening. To get those thoughts down, while they still sing in your mind, before sleep and the chores of the next morning erase the clarity.

At its most fundamental, a vineyard is an orchard, but it is also bringing art to life. The vines chosen to grow. How the vines are grown. When they are thinned and suckered and tucked and pulled and pampered, watered, babied all affect the ultimate child of the vine: the grape. If you are the culmination of everything that has brought you to this very point in your life, then so is the vigneron to the wine you sip.

A person can make music, and music is art. A person can paint or craft a violin or a solder a chandelier, and it will be considered art. Crafting the slowly growing canes of a vine up into the wires, suspended by the poles, the track of the sun carefully considered, the irrigation rigorously monitored, the treatments for diseases and pests consummately balanced with the pure product desired, all of this makes wine grapes the faktura of wine; the expression of art in its making.

A musician will practice several pieces of music repeatedly throughout their musical career. Some will be practiced standards that have become old friends, some will be the half-forgotten old piece that requires liquid-wrench to break the rust off and recall, along with a few apologies. Such is the practice of the vigneron in the vines.

At first, a new vigneron is consumed by the choices presented and obsesses over the right technique for this or that task upon the vine. A full vineyard to such a neophyte is an endless ocean surrounding them, overwhelming them. Drowning them in work.

Continual practice and a good instructor, like a music teacher, can start to push the students thinking decisions into the subconscious execution. The metronome of the vines is the seasons, however, and whether the student gets it right or fumbles at the notes, it tocks on unstoppable.

Now, after decades of vineyard work, I find my life has reversed. Things have slowed down. I am no longer the student, but there is no one to teach. So I will practice my labor of the day, whatever song the season has chosen or the vine as begged for me to perform for it. The vine rows are long and flowing, much like the surf of the shoreline of a beach. Your hands flow, like a paintbrush here, like a sculptor’s blade there. Like a weaver’s loom, the various strings are plucked. You do not simply work the plants, you play them like an instrument. Only together are you going to make music, make art.

As I said, vines are an orchard, but they are not as tall as trees. Like a shoreline, above the vines the sky is revealed in height and breadth all around you. A giant canvas displayed for your amusement. And the clouds and sun provide the pallet.

It is also like a shoreline, for you are the crab. You see, vigneron’s walk sideways to work, step after sidestep. Snip snip.

So we play musical vines along the grape shoreline, and the practiced motions have now become the subconscious mundane, and you can watch the sky. You are often working in what others call a relaxed vacation, alone with the vines stretching into the distance around you, and the sky stretching away into the distance above you, and you and the grapes play little pavans to slivers of a moon.