conclusion

This internship has been really fun. I feel like I have a much better feel for the grape growing agricultural business now. Growing up near a big city, I was never really exposed to this sort of life style, so it has all been a nice big learning experience for me. I now have a much better appreciation for all the work that it takes to make just one bottle of wine. Extremely fun stuff.
Cliff is an incredibly smart person; he knows so much about so much. Knowledge just seems to stream off of him, and I did my best to soak it up (Iron sieve Cliff. Iron sieve). I am very grateful to him for taking me on as his spring intern. When my parents and grandmother come down for graduation, I’m going to have them come visit CZ and taste some of Cliff’s wine. We also have some Cairn o’ Mohr wine that Pete shipped to us from Scotland that’s made out of oak leaves that we’re going to try (bit sceptical, but you never know…). I’m excited for Cliff, and I can’t wait for him to get his license so he can sell his fantastically good wine and I can come back and steal some :) Best of luck CZ!!!!!

VA vineyard meeting

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Field Trip!!! I went with Cliff to a vineyard near Charlottesville today for one of the VA vineyard meetings (not too sure the official name of the meeting). I got to briefly meet some important people in the VA grape-growing business and a few other grape growers in the area. Tony Wolf (basically the VA guru of grapes) talked a lot about vinifera and chemicals/fertilizers/pesticides and how important they are, which ones to use, how often, how much, and what for. Then we got to walk around the vineyard and check out the frost damage (particularly on the Chardonnay). The managers of the vineyard we were at also discussed how they were going to try and save their third year(/leaf) merlot crop, which had frost damage along the ends. Interesting to see a huge commercial vineyard as compared to Cliff’s more experimental one. They used a lot of technical wording and pesticide acronyms, ect. The grape-growing for wine-making business definitely has its own vocabulary. I’m glad I went after having my internship, since I felt more confident I knew most of what he was talking about J though I did learn that they like to pull leaves and hedge trim the canopy at times to try and increase the amount of sunlight that reaches the fruit to improve crop quality. (Cliff said it increases the amount of sugar in the grapes). I also learned that some vineyards have to put up bird netting to keep out certain migratory birds that have been destroying their crop. These poor grapes seem to have a lot of enemies. Cliff also got to give a mini speech himself (upon request) about what he’s doing with his hybrid crosses. (He explained how he’s trying to breed a Norton-like grape that is disease resistant but tasty). A lot of the people at the meeting grow grapes for their living in a way that doesn’t really allow for the kind of experimentation that Cliff does, so a few seemed a bit sceptical of the practicality (and benefits) of what he’s doing. But I think what he is doing is really important. I mean if you have to graft Chardonnay onto native stalk just in order for it to grow in VA soil, and you have to dump tons of chemicals on it just so you can get a decent crop out of it, there must be a more efficient way of doing things. I agree with the comment that Cliff made in the car about the way vinifera appear to be going. It’s getting trickier and trickier to grow them. I mean, the poor people will screw themselves over one day when they can no longer grow these non-native plants. Power to the hybrid growers and sustainability. It really is too bad that we have all these grape varieties available, but you only ever really see a few of the big name ones at the grocery stores. I’ve definitely resolved to expand my horizons and try some other kinds of varieties myself. We stopped by the Edible Landscaping place on the way back to Sweet Briar, and I met this really funny French dude (that Cliff was going to give some of his seeds to) and a few other very nice people, but we had to run off with brochures over our heads once it started to rain.

Celebration day!

Tuesday, May 1, 2007 (just for fun)

Today was a fun day. It was my last official day for my internship, so I went out to the Ambers farm a bit early to help them set up for the departmental party for tonight. When I got there, Cliff was finishing up mowing the vineyard again. (Grass grows relatively quickly!) Then I watched as he pumped the water out of their stream that piles up behind their mini homemade dam. It fills up with sediment over time, all the way to the top of the board (the dam wall) if they don’t dredge it. So, he had a pump with a mini fire hose attached to it that he used to pump out some of the muddy bottom water. Mucking about near the dam with a rake and hoe, he pushed the mud towards the hose so it could spray out and onto a patch near the vineyard gate. It made the ground really soupy and squishy, but it left behind nice brown silty dirt after the water percolated down or ran off downhill. Kinda neat stuff. It was a really hot day, so the cold water felt really good squishing my toes in. I had just finished my classes too, so I was enjoying running around in the grass in the sun. He almost sucked up a huge bull frog (BIGGEST frog I’ve ever seen), but it was big enough to get stuck in the front of the hose, so he just pulled it out. It seemed fine after blinking its eyes a bit and jumped back into the stream bank. The vines look like they are popping out quite nicely. The Vineyard looks even greener than it did last time.
The department party was fun. We had smoked turkey (yum) and tasty sides with tasty CZ wine. It was my birthday today, and the Ambers’ made me a cake!!!! It was a spicy carrot cake with cream cheese icing (my favourite :) :) :) :) Everyone sang. It was all very embarrassing and wonderful. Cliff even made me the unique trophy I’ve ever seen. Haha. It was great!

Vineyard databasing cont...

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Today I went out to the Ambers’ farm. When I arrived, Cliff broke out with the frozen Mackerel, which he nuked and sliced and placed in a glad tupperware container. I carried around the fish while he took down his home-maid bug traps that he had strung up in branches and placed all around their front yard area and around the vineyard. They consisted of empty vinegar jugs with four plastic bottle tops punched into the sides. The stinky fish was supposed to attract the bugs, and the little bit of vinegar/oil at the bottom is supposed to drown them once they get in, so they can’t get out. (The less bugs now, the less will be there to eat the grapes later in the growing season, hopefully.) A few traps seemed to be working. By the time we got around to them all the fish was thawing beautifully gooey in the sun. After that Cliff showed me what 10-10-10 fertilizer looks like—it looks like tiny bits of grey gravel or multi-sized kitty litter. He spread a handful on his potatoes. He then showed me what he uses to distribute the fertilizer on the vineyard. It’s just a little sac-type thing you sling over your shoulder with a mini handle turner that spins a ribbed disk that shoots the fertilizer out in front. You can actually see the areas of grass in the vineyard that were sprayed with the fertilizer from their darker colour. Amazing stuff for growing crops except for the fact that its production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels…hmm conundrum. We spent most of the day continuing to input into the vineyard database. We walked down rows 3 through most of 9 by the time the pocket computer’s battery died (though I don’t think my eyes could have lasted much longer squinting at the tiny reflective screen anyway). I plugged into the pocket computer the row, vine type, year it was planted, and distance from the first post. This Cliff measured using the cool and surprisingly accurate wheel-measuring device that he rolled along the vine row. While I was inputing data, Cliff nipped off the buds that were on the base of the vine (“suckers”). These buds receive nutrients first, so by taking them off, more nutrients would make it up along the vines on the wires, which is where he wants them to be fruitful. The vineyard’s starting to look green again! The shoots are several inches on the wires!

Sick grub microscopy

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Today I met Cliff at the train station geology lab where we are keeping our Japanese beetle larvae that we had collected in six rubbermaid tubs. We put on our purple rubber gloves and sifted through the soil with trowels to pick out all of our Japanese beetle larvae, which we looked over to try and determine if they had been infected. It was obvious that they were eating the roots of the clover and grasses that we had put in the soil to grow, so we were hoping that they were getting infected with the milky spore powder we had added as well. We found maybe twenty or so that looked pretty milky white all around or dead or decaying (hopefully from the milky spore disease), which we separated from the rest. Initially we were disappointed in finding so few, but after looking at several larvae, we decided that they were all in various stages of getting the disease. Cliff thought that more than likely they were all affected, but some were further along than others (since it takes up to two weeks or so for the disease to become obvious). We eventually decided that the healthier ones were relatively transparent and had a predominant black mark on their abdomen shortly up from the end, which gradually got concealed in by the increasing opaque milky colour of the diseased ones. So there were quite a few that looked like they might be in a middle stage of the disease. The infected ones were more of an obvious bright almost yellowish-white colour. Once we had sifted through all the soil, we replaced the non-diseased ones into the containers. Then Cliff cut open one of the obviously diseased ones to check out under the microscope. Since bacteria are really tiny and hard to see, it was still hard to find them even under 500x, but we think we found some floating in the blood between big round fat cells. They are supposed to look like mini toeless footprints. Cliff found a nematode too, which was really neat. It was this tiny wiggly worm (much bigger than the milky-spore though) that was see-through with a spike-like appendage in its rear-end. He had just ordered $95 worth of nematodes for the vineyard. Then we checked out the infected larvae themselves under a less-powerful microscope and found lots of mites on their abdomens, which Cliff said are probably symbiotic mites commonly found on Japanese beetle larvae. Gross white things though. When the larvae were all in a bowl together, a few of them started biting at one another. Once we checked them out under the microscope, we decided to further fertilize the soil in our containers with the infected ones (each infected larvae houses about 2 billion spores), so we blended up the infected ones with a bit of tap-water and spread them over the soil in the rubber-made tubs along with some added seed. Hopefully when we check the larvae again next week, we will find more that have been infected. Then I helped Cliff stuff envelopes of the final exam and certificates of oenophilia for the wine-tasting class, which we then took to the campus post office. In our remaining few minutes I accompanied Cliff to a farm supply place where he bought two bags of fertilizers for his garden.

Planting governmental cuttings

Thursday, April 19 2007

Today was a planting day. When I got to the farm, Cliff was hosing down the cuttings that he had gotten free from the government over the winter from both of the two main government-run vineyards, one in NY and one in CA, that grow tons of varieties and will give up to 20 cuttings to U.S. vineyards that ask for them. Very cool. Anyways, he had buried them to keep them alive over the winter, which is why they were dirty enough to merit hosing. Cool fact: in the dirt, the vines come in contact with roots from various other plants that are often infected with bacteria/viruses that are symbiotic to the plants, providing nutrients. So if the cuttings contact these, they will do even better underground. Some were even starting to bud. Once they were rinsed, we put the bunches into water buckets and carried the hybrid cuttings out to the vineyard where we “planted” them in the various “holes” in the vineyard. Cliff cut slits in the earth with the shovel and placed the cuttings (right end up) in the slits and packed them in (sooo much easier than trying to plant them roots and all. And they have a good chance of doing quite well too). I made sure they had strings stapled into the ground and attached to the first wire for support. We also made sure that each row of cuttings was labelled on either end with their original governmental labels or with sharpy on hot pink ribbon tape (at least until Cliff gets his fancy official blue ones printed out). It was chilly and overcast today. We were out in our hats and gloves, L but at least temperatures are staying well about freezing. A lot of the vines are starting to bloom now. Cliff was teaching me the difference between the males and female vines. The males tend to put out lots of large flower clusters while the females tend to put out a few smaller ones…or something like that. He nipped the buds off a few of the vines that he said would produce fruit on their second budding so that they would bloom late enough for him to hybridize with others. If next week stays in the 70s, the vineyard with really start to get leafy. We finished up planting quite a few cuttings before I had to go.

Wine up the snoz burns

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Today, I learned the importance of paying close attention to what you are doing when sniffing wine. I was a bit distracted listening to someone talk with my nose in the glass and proceeded to get a nostril-full of Sauvignon Blanc. Not very fun, but highly amusing to my slightly intoxicated wine-tasting buddies.
Tonight was our last wine tasting class :( It was almost sad near the end when I was helping pack up. I’ve really enjoyed the class. We’ve tried 75 different wines in 8 weeks! No power point lecture today. Instead, we started with a 20 question multiple choice final exam. The course isn’t graded, so we didn’t need to stress out too badly about it, but it actually was really hard!!! (For shame Cliff—actually finding out if we retained all your chemistry, math and German ranking sweetness scales—for shame.) It was fun though to realize how much I actually did learn, and I ended up doing ok on the test…naturally :)
Next we did a blind tasting of eight different wines using a Universal California 20-point wine evaluation scorecard. We were supposed to score the wines 0,1 or 2 in terms of colour, body, boquet, acidity, and several other categories. Then we added up the score. A rank of 12 on the scale is determined commercial, and since all of these wines were commercials wines, we should at least have come up with numbers that high, but Cliff said that there’s no real right answer. I’m not sure if I was doing it right, since I came up with anywhere between 7 and 17, but I suppose it was a bit difficult to rank them as “normal” or “off” if we didn’t know exactly what the wine we were tasting was supposed to be. Cliff also provided us with a “wine-bank” list of ten or twelve different wines on the scorecard, and we were supposed to try and see if we could match eight of them up with their bottles. We tasted four whites and four reds. Two paperbag wrapped bottles of each were on eight tables and we rotated around tasting them all. It was actually very cool because we had to keep open minds about the wines we were tasting; we didn’t initially have a clue what to expect, since we couldn’t see the bottle. So I found out without any pre-concieved notions or bias that I am a fan of at least one Shiraz and a Moscato.
I think everyone had an awesome time taking the wine-tasting class, and I have a feeling that it will continue to be very popular in future years. (Many of the faculty/staff expressed interest in returning for more fun next year). Perhaps it will even be offered for credit! Too bad all of us seniors won’t be here, but it did kind of act as a nice class bonding experience for our last semester here. Good end to a good class.

Grafting and rock excursion

Tuesday, April 17

Today I met Cliff at the train station where we checked on the grubs living in the plastic bins and chomping on sprouts. Looks like they’re eating the clover roots quite nicely. Soon we’ll be digging them up to see if they’ve been ingesting the milky spore as well. We then took a trip over to the community garden where Cliff taught me two different ways of grafting. For the first, he used this expensive but neat tool to punch out notches into the vines—one on the vine he was grafting to and one on the vine he was grafting with. The two notches fit together perfectly. Then he wrapped electrical tape around the puzzle-piece notch so that it would stay. We were grafting one of his hybrids onto a male native vine on the side of the old feeding barn. Once he had clipped the ends of the native vine to initiate the grafting, however, the vine started to bleed. Since this is detrimental to the whole grafting process (as the bleeding can prevent the notches from lining up well), he sawed at the base of the vine to cause it to bleed down there, and (due to gravity) the ends stopped bleeding. Now he can graft without worrying about it bleeding through the tape. The trick to grafting is to line up the zylem of each so that the plant the nutrients from the plant can reach the new vine. This can be tricky to do and is why whenever you graft you cross your fingers that it will work. For the second method, which he used mostly when the vine where he was grafting on was a bit thick, he cut a notch manually at the end of the vine using a knife and wedged the ends of his hybrid cutting (“weegie” J) to fit into the notch of the native vine. Since his hybrid vine cuttings were pretty small, he wedged two in side-by-side lining them up with the native vine along their edges. Then he wrapped tape around them and sprayed them with this grafting tar that was supposed to seal it up even more (smelly stuff). We got through two vines (well, he did, I got to hold the tar spray) before we headed back to the train station to meet up with Dr Rebecca Ambers and her Earth Materials class to go out along the James river in Lynchburg and look at rocks! Since Cliff was asked to come as a consultant (he got his Ph.D. in rocks) I got to tail along. We drove around and studied the different rocks found in the piedmont region of the Blue-ridge mountains south of the Shenancoah National Park Area. It was actually kind of cool trying to identify the various rock types and checking out the stratification and metamorphic folds, ect. The Blue-ridge really is an old mountain chain. Neato.

Grub hunting day 2

Thursday, April 12

Today we dug in the dirt. Got nice and really muddy this time. When I arrived at the farm Cliff was just finishing up canning pinto beans that they’d grown in their garden. Can you believe that I knew nothing about the age-old art of canning? It’s so funny the things certain people grow up with while others haven’t a clue. You basically boil them in a glass canning jar sitting in a layer of water, which boils and steams. (Cliff had like 6 jars going in a pressure-cooker-looking big metal pot). This causes it to seal the metal lid ontop, which stays on from the suction (and is why they pop when you open them). But you have to be careful when canning because the acidity has to be less than 4.6 or else the food may develop botulism, which is very deadly and kills if even tiny amounts are ingested. Isn't that interesting?
But onto my grubby adventures. Today we went out into the garden and continued to dig. We used a pick and a grape hoe to turn up the soil and dig out the grubs. We went down rows paralleling the plants starting at opposite sides of the garden and collecting them in our buckets. I got to wear Cliff’s orange chainsaw chaps to protect my knees, but I still got my red boots covered in dirt shuffling along the ground. Cliff did a much better job at finding the buggies then I did, (I think the grape hoe was a better call than the pick axe thing I was using because it went deeper), but we ended up with a good few hundred bugs by the time it was ready for me to leave. We put them in dirt in some plastic bins and wheelbarrowed them out to my car where we dosed them with milky spore. From there, I took them on into the train station lab and laced the surface with clover seeds. Let the infestation begin!

Grub collecting day 1

Tuesday April 10, 2007

Today we went grub hunting. Armed with a pitchfork, two shovels, a wheelbarrow, a bucket and a large metal sieve, we set out to rustle up some Japanese beetle larvae. Cliff cut about 15”x15” squares of sod a few inches deep from a spot in his yard, which we picked apart above the sieve resting on top of the wheelbarrow. Our first attempt was unsuccessful, so we decided to try out a different spot. This time we found one Japanese beetle larvae. Success! He was a second-instar larvae up near the grass roots where he was feeding on the organic matter. (Japanese beetle larvae tend to come to the surface to feed in early spring when temperatures reach 60 or so, usually around mid-April). We chucked him in our bucket along with some soil that had fallen through the sieve. Then, we flagged the spot so Cliff could later come out with the GPS to mark the relative abundance of larvae at each location we dug. (We were trying to figure out where they were most abundant, so we could come back out later to dig up more). We tried a number of different spots along the rows of vines in the vineyard and continued to cut up these squares of dirt and pick them apart looking for the little white grubbies. We found one or two in a few squares. One row came out consistently with five bugs per square, and in one spot we found 15 of the guys! Even so, Cliff said he had been digging up bunches of them last year (before he had sprayed thousands of the adult beetles), so we decided to try digging in the garden soil instead, to see if they were more abundant there. And there were! In one big patch at the end of the garlic row where the soil had earlier been overturned and disturbed, they were practically jumping out of the earth. Just raking at the surface layer exposed a few. So we dug up that area for a while before heading to the corn patch where we found a few more along with some glass, rusted nails and other interesting artefacts. We found several different kinds of grubs. Just a few that I can remember included several June bugs (that are gargantuan in comparison to the Japanese beetle larvae-like monster-truck vs car size), a firefly larvae (it had a pretty pink stripe on it), some mystery cocoons, and several grey cutworms, which we promptly smushed, since they hurt the buds growing on the vines. We ended up collecting approximately 220 Japanese beetle larvae in the end. Not a bad haul. I took them back to the lab in white tub containers with sifted soil for use in our experimentations. It didn’t look like any of the ones we collected were infected with milky disease.

Bottle washing and tempeh smoking

Friday, April 6, 2007

Today I went out to the Ambers’ farm a bit early and smoked the tempeh we had made yesterday (cooked I mean, not inhaled). It had been in the drying rack for almost 24 hours and the mould had grown in it cementing the soybeans together in cakes that looked kind of like Brie cheese. Cliff prepared the grill/smoker device/thing by fuelling it up with wood on the bottom and starting the fire using the biggest blowtorch I’ve ever seen (it’s one of the ones used for killing weeds). He then placed a pot of water over the fire to provide the steam to keep the cakes from drying out. Then he tore off the plastic bags and placed the tempeh patties on the rack over the fire six at a time. After that, he put a lid on top of them and let them sit and smoke for a while. The first batch we smoked on top of hickory wood that he had chopped up. It was a bit windy, so thick white smoke kept blowing everywhere, but it was very nice-smelling and worked quite well turning them a pretty tan colour. For the next batch, Cliff added sawdust-like shavings of fruit trees to the fire, which gave the cakes a more faint smoky smell with less of the strong, spicy hickory smell. He then decided to use up the rest of the fire to smoke some tofu (yumm). All the cakes were put in the freezer except for one, which we sliced and fried up with oil and salt on the stove (like bacon) so I could try it. YUM! I think I’ve been converted! (Seriously, you guys should go out and try this stuff.)
After our nice snack we went down to the basement where I sat on a rocking chair watching Cliff rack a few wines using a racking hose to draw the wine off the solids that had precipitated out and accumulated at the bottom of the big bottles. One he topped up with wine left over from last year and put back in with the others to continue in its aging process. Another wine he racked did not taste very good, so he mixed it with another batch that tasted a bit better. Then he added lots of sugar to it, which made it very syrupy and sweet, but he said some people like their wines that way, so he let me keep a bit to bring back for my roommates (who are among a few of those that do). He also tested a few of the completed batches for their pH and acidity recording everything down in his book. Then I washed bottles, while he filled them and corked them with the completed wine (using his special CZ vineyard corks). I used a brush attached to a screwdriver and OxiClean to wash the empty bottles he had stored in the cellar. Then I rinsed them three times and put them on a bottle tree. It got a bit repetitive but was actually kind of therapeutic, excluding the incident where I almost lost a finger to the mechanical brush when it took a bite of my plastic glove, ripping it off my hand and turning the wire into a mangled mess. Luckily I kept my digits and Cliff had an extra brush. I went through four cases of empty bottles and about seven? pounds of wine before it was time to stop. Cliff gave me the dregs of the Oaked Seyval to take home with me along with the wonderful smell of wood smoke on my clothes. Yay for wine internships!

String tying and tempeh making

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Today I made tempeh! When I got out to the vineyard, Cliff was splitting soy beans in a grinder/splitter device, so I helped crank the whole batch of through. Then we put them in a huge metal pot and boiled them, stirring them and skimming off the foam and husks that rose to the surface. Then we left it covered simmering while we went out into the yard to do a bit of maintenance work. Cliff took some pictures of the beautiful foliage and peach, apple, and pear trees that had started flowering already. We’re supposed to get freezing temperatures for the next few nights, so we covered the potato plants in a thin layer of dirt to insulate them. A few vines were beginning to sprout as well forming miniscule flower/grape clusters near the nodes. We took down some firewood from the shed and then headed out to the vineyard where we added strings to the newly transplanted vines. We tied the orange string to long staples that we stuck into the ground next to the baby vines and tied them onto the first wire to give the vines something to attach to as they grow. The wind was quite frigid today. The poor sprouting vines are going to die! Cliff said that most vines will re-bud two more times if the first ones don’t survive, but that typically only the first ones actually produce fruit. So certain varieties that bud early have a risk of being more susceptible to early spring freezes. It makes me glad that he has so many different varieties, so he’ll have a better chance of some surviving. Hopefully the buds on most of his vines will survive the next few days.



Then we came inside and I poked a grid of holes in plastic sandwich bags while he drained the soybeans and added vinegar and the special tempeh-making powder and mixed it all up. Then he added around 10-11 oz of the mixture in each plastic bag (we weighed and recorded them for fun-to see how much money he was saving by making his own instead of buying it in a store) and placed them in the drying rack (the holes in the bags were for aeration) to mould (or allow fungal fermentation) over a 24 hour period. While we were making it, Cliff gave me a nice speal about soybeans being a miracle food. Did you know that the U.S. is the world’s top producer of soybeans? They are a great nutritional substitute for beef; they are high in protein and other essential nutrients and low in fat and cholesterol, very cheap, and you don’t have to refrigerate them. We ended up making about 12 pounds of tempeh total! Then in the last few minutes, we worked out some milky spore calculations using the new milky spore powder formula to determine how many bugs we need to collect and infect in the lab in order to produce enough milky spore to cover his fields.

Vine collecting on High Peak

Thursday, March 29, 2007

I took Pete with me to experience my wonderful internship at Chateau Z vineyard today! It was a beautiful day, so Cliff decided to be super super nice and drove us up to High Peak in his truck, where we took in the gorgeous scenery as well as harvested a few wild grapes to bring back to the vineyard, which he had found last year growing along the winding road up to the mountain-top. They were a bit tricky to try and untangle, but Cliff managed to get two cuttings with roots on them, which we rolled in plastic bags with wet leaves to keep their roots from drying out. After taking a short refreshing coffee break upon our return (Cliff makes a very decent cup o’ joe), we planted the two wild vine cuttings in the vineyard. Then Cliff took us on a mini tour of his backyard woodland property showing us old masonry from abandoned cabins and an old cemetery. We also watched as he cleaned out the white bin (not sure what it’s called) that is used to catch the water from the creek flowing downhill, which provided the water pressure for a hose to be used for gardening, ect. It was plugged up from the silt that had accumulated over the winter, so he just unplugged it, running it through the plastic container until the water ran clear, so that the hose downhill could be used again as a supplemental water supply for the garden and vineyard. After that, he gave Pete a tour of the cellar and gifted him three bottles of wine to take back to Scotland. Needless to say, I think Pete thoroughly enjoyed himself. Most fabulous day.

Fruity Wine night

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

I had a visitor today! Pete, whom I’d met last year at St Andrews, came to visit during his spring break! So, naturally, I took him wine tasting with me J. We did fruity wines tonight. Very tasty. I found out that blueberry wine is actually quite yummy. I liked a lot of the fruit wines, actually. And I learned a little bit about Scotland’s geography as well (Thanks Cliff :P) I think Pete really enjoyed himself.

Vine transplanting

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Today I got nice and muddy. We did some transplanting of vines this time, digging holes and placing the young roots in them. We dug them up out of the nursery area in the garden where Cliff had planted them. We tried to keep as much of their roots in tact as we could, which was surprisingly difficult as many of their root systems were just as big if not bigger than the vine twig itself! We took several different varieties of vines bundling them up in batches of ten or so or each with labelled pink tape and stored them in buckets full of water (to keep their roots from drying out). Then we carted them up to the vineyard where we planted them among the rows, replacing old/dead vines and filling out a few empty spaces along the wires on the right side. Cliff did most of the digging, which I planted them, so it went by pretty quickly (even though we had to stop for a coffee break in the middle, since I needed the extra energy boost!). The vines were actually much easier to transplant than the trees had been since we didn’t need to dig quite as deep holes. As long as they were deep enough for the main roots to reach down and we didn’t bury the feeder roots too deep, we were good to go!

Last day of pruning at the Annex!

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Today I continued my background reading on developing a plan for “growing” milky spore in the lab with the grubs in the morning. In the afternoon I headed out to the Annex Vineyard by the Sweet Briar Community Garden. We finished pruning today (ALL DONE with this season’s pruning!) Then I watched Cliff change the blade on the lawn mower/tractor thing and jump-started its battery from his truck. Then we pruned the apple and crab-apple trees that he planted in 2002 around the outside of the fence surrounding the garden. The idea was to thin them out leaving a straight trunk/branch up the middle and then trimming off the branches that were facing inward leaving a relatively open space in the middle. I mostly just followed Cliff with the wheelbarrow picking up the branches he was cutting off the trees and chopping them up so they’d fit nicely in the wheelbarrow before adding them to the brush pile, which is now gargantuan! It was hot and sunny today, so I got nice and scratched up carrying around twig bundles and wearing my tank top (note to self-wear long sleeves when pruning at a vineyard). I also now officially have my first spring sunburn.

Tree Transplanting for use as future vine-posts

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Today, I went out to the Ambers’ farm and helped Cliff transplant about 12, year-old trees that he had started from seeds in his garden. We added them to three or four rows he had already put in on one side of their property. He’s growing them for their future use as fence posts for his vineyard (which is why we planted them in a polygon grid pattern). First, we dug holes for the trees with shovels. I learned the proper method of doing this by first removing the top layer of sod starting at the centre and going in a circle around it and then digging down a foot or so. We dug 12 holes lined up 14 feet? apart in rows that lined up in a zigzag pattern. A few holes were very rocky and difficult to dig. We even found the remains of what looked like a gravel road as well as a huge boulder in one of them. While we were digging, we also were collecting Japanese beetle and June bug grubs as we found them in the soil, which we’ll take to lab later. After digging the holes, Cliff dug up the saplings from the garden and we transported them in his green tractor bed keeping their roots covered with dirt (so they wouldn’t dry out). We then placed the treelings in the holes we had dug, covering them with the dirt, which was packed down on top of them to approximately ground level. Then we placed the sod back on top upside-down in a circle around the tree, which will eventually decompose and contribute nice rich organic matter to the growing trees. We ended up with five leftover saplings, which we placed in/near where the backyard woods meets their lawn in hopes that they’d grow there, since we’d already dug them up and didn’t want them to die. The weather was almost hot today! I got nice and dirty and sweaty, and now my back’s a little sore from all that shovelling, but it was nice to be outside on such a beautiful day.

Another research day

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Was supposed to go out to the annex vineyard today to finish pruning, but Cliff was sick with the flue, so I did some more research on milky spore disease and tried to come up with a formula for the amount of bugs we need to infect in order to produce enough spores to cover his vineyard instead. Managed to plough through a number of big references. Who knew there have been so many studies done on these things?

Wine Tasting Week 5

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Wine-tasting. More whites tonight. I learned that almost all white and rosé wines are meant to be consumed relatively soon after they are bought. Though whites that are particularly acidic, alcoholic, tannic (oaky), or very sweet may survive long aging. I also found out that they are best stored upside-down or on their sides and served at cellar temperature (50-55ºF). Our table brought in cheese, crackers, and grapes, which helped me to better taste each individual wine I think, almost like clearing the pallet between them, or something. Cliff’s Seyval Blanc CZ wine was actually my favourite of the bunch! [Helped with set-up and clean up.]

Bottle Labeling and more pruning

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Today I helped Cliff calculate grape content percentages for a few of his wines that he had bottled the day before. I used the extensive records he has kept of the entire wine-making process for each of the wines he has made/is making from the grapes he picked in the 2006 growing season. Just before bottling them, he had recorded the pH, TA (acidity), and SO4 content of the wine, which he later typed up on his temporary labels along with the date the wine was bottled, and the name of the wine based on its grape content. (Once he begins to sell his wine, he will also add other mandatory information on the labels, including alcohol percentage and net content as well as his specific brand label, name and location). He then printed them off and we went down to the cellar to stick them onto the three different wines he had bottled. Once the labels were stuck onto the appropriate bottles, they were placed upside down (to prevent the corks from drying out) in boxes, which were then taped up and labelled as well. One of the wines we had added the bentonite to last week was now clear, but the other one was still cloudy, so Cliff said he’d have to add something else to that one later on to try and clear it up. Next we went out to the vineyard and continued pruning. We managed to finish almost an entire lower row before 5:30. It is still a bit too chilly to dig for grubs.

Wine Tasting Week 4

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

First day of red wines. Today we looked at the classics, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Pinot Noir. We also did an experiment with adding toasted oak chips to boxed Burgundy wine. We smelled the difference between light, medium, and dark oaks (yes, they do smell different!) and then we added a little bit of the dark oak to the wine. The wine smelled (and tasted) much better after we stirred in the oak. It’s amazing what adding one thing can do to change the wine! I can see how adding oak chips, or fermenting or aging wine in oak barrels could produce some very tasty wines.

Pruning at CZ continued

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Today I went out to the CZ Vineyard. First we went down to the cellar where his wine was still undergoing the fermentation process. Cliff had already added fining agents to the vats that needed it (milk powder, ect). However, two white vats were still cloudy, so he added a few oz of bentonite and mixed it in with a cool propeller-type rod. So hopefully the particles will settle out of suspension and the wine will be clear within a few days. Next, we went out into the vineyard to do some more pruning. It was much easier to prune these vines than the ones at the annex vineyard. We got through the top row and then decided to try out using the handheld computer database. We walked down the second row and recorded the distance from the first post each vine was using a measuring tape along the ground. I typed the row, the distance, the vine type, and the year it was planted and the computer program recorded its exact location based on the location of the starting post. After that, we continued pruning along another row using the spur pruning technique this time.

pruning day two at the annex vineyard

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Today was gorgeous outside, but very very windy. When I got to the vineyard, Cliff had already completed pruning the second row, so I picked up all the vines he had discarded along the row and took them over to the brush pile until I caught up with him starting on the next row. I helped trim the excess vines too, but mostly just picked up and carted away all the trimmings that he was dropping as he stood on the ladder and did the main pruning. The wind was strong enough to knock the wheelbarrow over a few times and I got scratches on my arms from carrying twigs, but other than that it was rather rhythmic and pleasing work (for a short while anyway). We took a small break around 3:30 and walked around the SBC garden fence making sure that the electrical wiring wasn’t being short-circuited? somewhere by making sure the hot wires were clear of debree/metal meshing. Then we continued pruning. Some of the vines were rather mangled from the previous year when Cliff had just hacked the vines off with a power hedge trimmer to prune them, (since, unlike CZ, the annex vineyard is mostly left to its own growing devices, so he could get away with that). We stopped after four hours, but we still had a few rows left to do. Our brush pile is getting rather large.

some grub growing&dissection, and pruning day one at the annex

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Today I went to the Amherst Mill to pick up a handful of some red clover, rye grass and blue grass, which I brought back to the train station where we mixed it into some vineyard soil and put it in an antfarm as food for some june bug grubs that Cliff had found. We also added some store-bought milky spore powder (0.02% vol) to the mix to watch them crawl around and try to see if they get infected (hopefully) and what happens when they do (yay for more dissection), how long it takes, ect. Then Cliff took three of them that looked pretty down/diseased already to dissect under the microscope. It was revolting and kinda cool at the same time. Then we checked out their fat bodies under a stronger microscope hooked up to the computer.
Next we headed out to SBC garden where we did a bit of pruning on the vines in the garden, along the shed/barn wall and on the first row of the annex vineyard. First Cliff killed two vines that he didn’t want anymore by chopping them off at the base, drilling holes into them, and adding RAID in the holes. Then we walked around with the wheelbarrow and our sheers and started hacking away at the vines. Cliff basically cut off the main stems and placing the few essential vines where he wanted them so that they would grow back next year while I tried to remove the thinner excess vines near the top. I was a bit paranoid of cutting the wrong one, but I managed to get into tearing down the tangled twigs after a while. They were really twisted and difficult to untangle from the wires sometimes, but we managed to get through enough vines to make a decent sized brush pile. We still have five rows left though, so I’m going to head back over hopefully to finish them off on Thursday when the weather is supposed to be warmer. Very exciting!
Also, later tonight I did some research on Japanese beetles and milky spore disease while I was doing my laundry. Very fascinating stuff what people have done to gain knowledge that seems so seemingly irrelevant but when all strung together actually is extremely useful.

2nd wine-tasting class

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Tonight I helped Cliff with the set up and clean up of his second wine-tasting class. He talked more about the chemistry of wine-making this time, which was interesting, but far more complex than I had thought with a lot of ifs, ands, but maybes, and therefores. Since I have a swim competition this weekend though, I had to spit out all the wine I tasted, so it wasn’t quite the same experience as last time. Though since I was able to keep my head a little less-fuzzed, I noticed I was able to consolidate wines near the end much better and came home with an arm that didn’t smell like wine this time.

making bondfires and taking cuttings

Sunday February 11, 2007

Today I went over to the Amber’s vineyard to work outdoors! (yay!) It was a bit chilly, but not as bad as it has been, though there’s still some snow on the ground. First I got to watch Cliff cut down a tree maybe a foot diameter and trim the branches off, which we carted down with his tractor-cart-thing to add to the brush pile of trimmings from the vines in order to help it burn (since they were still a little green). We added a little deisil fuel (not gasoline because that would explode) and got a nice hot fire going which dried up the clippings enough so that they burned. He still has a lot of trimming to do, and needed to make space for a new pile. By the time the vine excess caught fire it was smoking pretty badly, but uber fun to watch so long as the wind didn't shift too suddenly and send smoking ash clouds in our faces. I also watched as Cliff spread some more ash on the vineyard that he collects from their fireplace to help bring up the pH of the soil. Then we went around the vineyard taking cuttings from certain different vines that people had ordered online. Each cutting was about a foot long consisting of three or four nodes and about pencil width. The bottom of the cutting was cut straight across the vine while the top was cut at an angle. That way whoever got them would know which end goes up, since vines won’t send nutrients the opposite way up the stalk (which I thought was interesting). I was kind of surprised how different the vines were. Some seemed to be thinner and straighter with not as many nodes while others were pretty twisty, ect. Then when we had however many they had ordered from each vine type (most seemed to be around 25) we would bundle them up and tie them at the top and bottom end with labeled pink ribbon-tape and put them in buckets with water to keep them moist. Then later Cliff said he would wrap them in wet newspaper and a trash bag and mail them out. Next time we have a nice day Cliff said he would take me out to help him prune, or cut back a lot of the vines essentially down to the first wire for next season. If we don’t, the vines go haywire and get tangled and would end up everywhere and produce too much fruit.

research day

Thursday February 8, 2007

Today was more of a catch-up/research day. I finished up writing my blog entries to put up online and did some research on nematoads. We were looking up websites that were selling them to get a feel for how much they cost. We also were trying to figure out more info on Japanese beetles and milky spore disease as well and how they are infected, ect. to see if we could effectively “grow” or reproduce the milky spore ourselves so that we could use it to infect the beetles at the vineyard. Cliff bought an ant farm online and now I have a pile of references for my paper I will be working on later on...

first wine-tasting class

Wednesday February 7, 2007

Today I helped Cliff set up for his first wine-tasting class setting out glasses and pitchers and then sitting at the door collecting class dues and checking IDs. I also helped him clean up afterwards corking bottles, cleaning up trash, and dumping out pitchers, ect. During the class, we tasted eight different wines and I learned some of the basics on how to observe them and take notes (see, swirl, smell, sip, and savour). We focused more on cheap whites today. I learned to try and pick out the grape smell/taste from other things that might contribute to the boquet, and what the “legs” of wine are (the tears that form on the glass after you swirl it—the more defined they are, the more alcohol is in the wine). Very fun. It’s surprising how much the wine went to my head even when I was pouring out probably half of the oz of each that we were tasting from into the spit bucket. (we tasted two at a time and by the last two I had troubles keeping straight which was which  ) I had fun trying to describe the smell and flavour. It was kind of tough to pick out certain smells and articulate what I thought I was smelling, but it was fun with a group of people at the table, since when someone suggested a certain smell I could sometimes then smell it myself. Holding the wine in my mouth and swishing really helped me to taste the flavour and keep it on my tongue longer too. I think I’ve mostly just knocked back wine before, more or less, (I know that’s terrible) so this was an interesting experience to actually take the time to try to savour it. I had always thought I was more of a fan of dry whites too, since I liked a particular kind of dry white, but I found that the two really dry whites we tasted near the end were not particularly to my liking, so I’m looking forward to tasting a few more different kinds to see if I am indeed a fan of dry or if I’m actually more of a fan of sweet whites. Plus I just felt more sophisticated swirling my wine glass.

nutrient analysis and fertilizer recommendations

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Today I finally got to analyze my results myself to figure out what it all meant!!! The testing kits themselves had a surprising amount of information regarding the recommended soil concentrations for the major essential nutrients for plants that are found in soil; N, P, K, Ca, Mg, and S. So basically, first I did a bit of research on why their presence is so important for plant (particularly grape) growth, then I looked at their fertilizer recommendations (since adding fertilizers would raise/lower concentrations in order to approach the recommended optimum levels). Based on these recommendations, I was able to then formulate exactly how many bags of which fertilizers we should buy in order to reach these levels given how large the CZ vineyard is. Very exciting stuff!

Here are some basic facts I found about …

N (nitrogen): probably the most essential element for plants biochemical processes as a component in chlorophyll. It enhances above-ground growth, hastens plant maturity (as long as levels aren’t excessive), and is very influential in fruit sizing. However, too much nitrogen can cause excessive growth, which would not be good particularly for growing grapes for quality and not quantity.

P (phosphorous): also hastens maturity, encourages root development, and increases its resistance to disease. If concentrations are low, it can retard plant growth and lowers its vigour. However, unlike N, an excess of it is ok. P is often gradually depleted with cropping, so it must be replaced with phosphate fertilizers if concentrations are too low.

K (potassium): is an important basal metal cation in plant biochemical functions as it enhances disease resistance as well as fruit size, flavour, texture and development. Usually soils with high clay content have higher potassium content whereas sandy soils or those with little/no clay have low native K levels and are subject to severe leeching and annual K applications are required. (This is common in the S.E. US areas). The test we used measured for available K, which include the exchangeable colloids and potassium in the soil solution.

Total Ca (aka replacable calcium): concentrations can range from 0.1 to 25% in the soil and has a direct correlation with the acidity of soils. Acidic soils (usually found in the eastern half of the US) tend to have low Ca levels. Soils with lots of lime in them have high Ca concentrations. Ca is responsible for maintatining optimum pH levels as it reduces the acidity and toxicity of other minerals such as manganese, Zn, and Al. As such, it acts as a stabalizer in soil. It will not limit plant growth, but it effects other things which can. If concentrations are low, it indicates that much of the active Ca in the soil has been replaced by hydrogen or other ions, as in acidic or highly alkaline soils. Ca levels in normal sandy soils are usually around 500ppm; clay soils tend to be 1000ppm; and humus soils (like peats and forest molds) should be around 500ppm.

Mg (magnesium): like calcium, has its source in limestone, so naturally soils found in areas with lots of limestone will tend to have higher Mg concentrations. Mg is essential for plant photosynthesis. If concentrations are low, add limestone (treat with the dolomitic lime fertilizer), which contains lots of magnesia, but if your soil doesn’t need lime, they recommend adding Mg sulfate, Mg oxide or Mg and K sulfate. If concentrations are high/very high coupled with low Ca levels, they recommend treating it with gypsum or high calcite lime, with prevents Ca deficiency because of over-balance of Mg.

Based on our results for Mg and Ca, it appears that we don’t have to do much to the soil as it is already at the levels expected for the area and type of soil we have.
Our K levels were very high, so we also didn’t need to do anything to change K levels. N and P were a different matter, however. The test kit booklet recommended that when growing grapes, the NPK requirements were that they were all (at least/around) medium levels. Since we only found trace amounts of N and P, it’s clear that we need to bring up concentrations by adding fertilizers. Using their convenient chart in the back of their book (which gave their fertlilizer recommendations based on our test results), I found that according to their recommendation of adding 5lbsN/2000ft2 we would need around 145lbs of N, that’s 3.81 100lb bags of nitrogen fertilizer at 38%N (or 38lbsN/ 100lb bag) [given that the vineyard is 1.33 acres or 57,934 ft2]. They recommended we add 6lbsP/2000 ft2 that’s around 174lbsP, which is 3.86 100lb bags of phosphorous fertilizer at 45%P (or 45lbsP/100lb bag). However, Cliff thought that we probably would only need to add 4lbs of each per 2000 ft2 (he interpreted their recommendation chart slightly differently), which would amount to only 3 100lb bags of N fertilizer and 2.5 100lb bags of P fertilizer. And since they are sold in 50lb bags, that would be 6 bags N fertilizer and 5 bags P fertlilizer. However, Cliff said that he knows that the grape vines are already growing quite well without the fertilizer and that excessive nitrogen can cause excessive plant growth (which we don’t need), so he recommends not adding quite so much N and will add probably buy the 5 bags of P fertilizer and only 3 bags of N fertilizer.
Wow! Who knew this would be so much work to figure out how much fertilizer you need! I guess I always just assumed the more the merrier. But now I know that it’s essential to get the right balance for plant growth as well as economics. Fertilizers can be expensive!
After figuring this all out, I also started looking at mapping the vineyard onto the computer. Cliff had set up a database in Access which will record vine locations spacially based on mapping the rows and using trigonometry to find out the UTM (universal transverse mercador) corrdinates of each vine given: the UTM coordinates of the end points of all 23 rows; the angles of the rows of vines to an imaginary xy grid; and the length between vines along the rows (which we will measure out in the vineyard sometime next week, hopefully when it’s warmer). While Cliff had already programmed the formula into the database so that we could plot the location points of each vine once we found the distance along the row each vine was, he wanted to explain to me how he had derived it. Who knew I would actually use my 9th grade trigonometry knowledge of sin, cos, tang, and hypotenuse stuff! I just wish I’d remembered it a bit better... We also took a look at the database entry form itself on Access, which helps him to organize the names, breeds, particular hybrids, parents, and other qualitative and quantitative descriptions of his grapes. By the time we’re done, we will also have UTM coordinates for each vine in the database! That way we can bring the data into a GIS system where we will be able to create various maps of the vineyard and highlight certain data entries for each vine (represented by a point) to make interesting conclusions on data in a visual way or quickly pinpoint where a particular plant might be.

Mg and Ca testing

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Today I tested a few random samples (#s 1,5,9,14, 17, and 19) for magnesium and calcium using a different soil testing kit. I found that our Mg levels were medium to high, though probably more towards the higher side. The Ca test was much harder and was based on matching up various shades of grey and depending on the color-matching method I used and how much I squinted, I got slightly different results. I even enlisted Dr R Ambers as a second pair of eyes, but she had trouble deciphering the exact colour match as well, so I settled for a relative range. However, concentrations seem to center around an average of 1000ppm, some falling above and some slightly below that. (I cut today’s session a bit short, since I wasn’t feeling all that well.)

NPK and pH analysis continued...

Sunday, January 28, 2007

I went to the train station this frigid morning for another three hours to get ahead on my internship quota for the week. It went faster this time. I got into a rhythm and timed the testing just right with the various mixings and waiting for reactions, ect. I even boogied to country on the radio (which seemed to be the only good station that came in clear out here), since I was alone in the lab. I managed to get through five more samples before I ran out of Stock Solution for the Potassium test. I tried using the red pH probe instead of the green one this time, and it seemed to work a bit better as it didn’t keep rising quite so much. The results are still coming out pretty much the same for all the samples. I put my results into an excel spread sheet this time. Only seven more vineyard samples and the garden sample to go!

NPK and pH analysis completed

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Today I went back to the train station and finished testing the rest of the soil samples for the vineyard in testing for pH, P, and N (but we did not have any more stock solution for the K test anywhere, so I had to drop that one for the rest of the samples). Results were still relatively the same with the pH hovering between 6.5 and 6.8 or so and the P and N only at trace levels. I also tested a sample of soil taken from the Ambers garden, which had high levels of phosphorous (the test indicator showed a very pretty blue colour in contrast to the grey of the previous samples, so it was very exciting!), but still only trace levels of nitrogen. I also tested wood ash that Cliff had put on part of the vineyard (taken from their stove), which had a high pH (since it had a small amount of lime in it). The ash reacted to the P and N indicators by fizzing up (due to its calcium carbonate content—the indicators probably had acid in them), but I still managed to test it for P and K, and the results were only at the trace levels. Cliff had come in and was looking up what kind of fertilizers and how much he needs to add to the vineyard to bring up the NPK levels in the soil to optimize its growing capacity (..does that phrase make sense?). It’s nice to know all this testing is actually helpful! Thursday I plan to use another test kit to test for calcium, magnesium and possibly chlorine for a few of our samples.

NPK and pH soil analysis

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Today was a lab day up at the train station. Cliff had finished taking cores from the rest of the vineyard. I started analyzing the soil samples for Potassium, Nitrogen, Phosphorous and pH. I got through seven of our 19 samples, each of which I randomly picked out of our bucket. It was tedious work. I used a splitter device to divide up the sample into halves until I had a tablespoon or so of sample (split about 5 times), which I then weighed out on a calibrated scale: 10g for pH testing, 1.5g for Phosphorous testing, 1g for Nitrogen testing, and 2g for Potassium testing. To test the sample for pH, I used a pH probe, which I standardized using standard solutions of pH 7 and 4.01. I then took my 10g sample of the soil and mixed it with 10mL of DI water in a beaker, swirled it and let it sit for around 10 minutes before testing it with the probe. The pH seemed to hover around 6.5-7. I used a test kit to test for P, N and K, which involved various indicator solutions, powders, and pills and mixing them in test tubes, ect. I found only trace amounts of P and N. The K levels were very high. While these results varied slightly with the different samples, they remained very similar across the board. It will be interesting to see if the rest of the samples continue this trend. I will probably continue/finish testing next Thursday. I also was going to use another test kit to analyze the samples for magnesium and calcium as well, perhaps at a later date…

collecting soil samples

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Today I spent four hours out in the cold digging up dirt. (yay!) Cliff had mapped out his vineyard and divided it up into 19 paralellogram-type sections of roughly equal area (about 3,400ft²). We then went out into the field armed with a wheelbarrow, a large sieve (of I’m guessing .5cm by .5cm grid in a wooden frame), two sediment corers with bent spatulas, three buckets, plastic bags and a sharpee. We collected soil samples from within each area by taking sediment cores of one-inch diameter and about 5-6 inches deep. We took six cores per row for seven rows in each section alternating taking cores from the middle and the top of the row zigzagging across each row and collecting them all in a bucket. We each started from opposite ends and met at the wheelbarrow in the middle. Then we pushed our samples through the sieve on top of the wheelbarrow until we were left with a mixture of sifted soil that represented the entire section, which we collected in quart-sized plastic bags and labelled 1-19 (one bag per section). We got through approximately two thirds of the vineyard before 5pm. It was thoroughly exhausting work. We both had sore backs and sore hands from working out in the field. (We must have taken about 500 cores!) I have a new respect for manual labourers and farmer people.

Foxy Vixen Seedling Harvest

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

I met up with Cliff around 1:30 to head over to the annex vineyard at the SBC community garden that’s on campus out near the pottery barn, where he had a few rows of grapes; mostly wild foxy vixen seedlings that he’d planted there in ’03 and left to grow with little monitoring and no pesticides. The beetles had gotten to the leaves on the one type of vine (either primarily the cordifolia or labrusca, I can’t remember), but they were posted high enough to be out of reach of the deer, and had fared remarkably well. We harvested a number of the foxy vixen seedlings (grown from a vine he had found across 29), which were smaller and a bit sour, but actually quite tasty—not nearly as bad tasting and seedy as some of the other wild grapes that were growing. Cliff said I might be able to breed them next spring, since I’m on campus and can more easily watch them grow. After flagging the vines, we put the grapes in their respectively labelled plastic baggies to take back with us. Cliff said he was going to use them in making Vixen Noir and Vixen Blanc wine grapes.

I think the idea of Sweet Briar having its own vineyard (like we used to have an orchard and dairy barn) to produce a little income for the school is a marvellous idea, one the alum are sure to approve of so long as we could fund the initial start-up of the project. I mean we certainly have the acreage. And now that Cliff’s wine appreciation course has been approved for next semester, we’re on the right track! (All SBC students 21 and older should join by the way.)

My First Look at Chateau Z

Tuesday October 3, 2006

I drove out to the Ambers’ farm to check out the vineyard and the last of this season’s harvest. Cliff wanted me to get a look at the vines while they still actually had grapes on them, since they won’t when I start my internship in January. I got there around 4:30 and got suited up right away with some gloves and a very attractive wide-brimmed had (which I was grateful for later, since the gnats were so bad) before heading out to take a walking tour of the vineyard. I thought it was pretty decent sized for a relatively young vineyard—maybe one or two acres (?). We started out by walking around inside the electric fence surrounding the rows of vines, all of which Cliff had erected himself—very impressive. I tried to listen while he was rattling off the scientific names for all the different kinds of grapes he’s growing, and there were a lot. Listening to him talk I could tell that he is very into his grapes, and I felt the sudden urge to go look up wine terms, since all I really knew about vineyards was that I liked drinking dry whites. Among other things he explained to me a bit about the history of winemaking in the US and the difference between American native and European grapes in terms of resistances to different diseases and tastes, ect. He’s trying to breed grapes that will produce wine that have all the good qualities of both kinds.

I was initially struck by how many different kinds of grapes there were and how very different from each other a lot of them looked. And contrary to what I’d heard about winemaking grapes before, some of them actually tasted quite good! He had left a few vines worth of grapes of the Vidal Blanc, which I helped him to pick. Now, I’d been warned before about the hornets that like to swarm around the grapes around harvest time, but I don’t think I was really prepared for how much the grapes were literally swarming with life! When I cut the bunches off the vines, I had to be very careful not to grab a hornet, a wasp, or a bee that were buzzing everywhere. There were also loads of flies, some spiders and even birds pecking at the grapes to attract them. Cliff explained to me how this vineyard that’s teeming with life goes quiet for a few days after each time he does necessary (but expensive, inconvenient, and non-discriminatory) pesticide sprays. I’m definitely looking foreword to helping him develop organic solutions to some of these expensive and inefficient chemical pesticides. We talked a bit about using milky spore to kill Japanese beetles, which are a problem in this area (as I saw the following week when harvesting some native plants)—something that I will be working on next semester.

After they were picked, the bunches had to be looked over, and the damaged and rotten berries had to be picked out along with the “mummies” or berries that had died and shrivelled up from black rot. I also looked over the grapes for any lingering pests, particularly ladybugs, since apparently just one overlooked ladybug can ruin an entire batch of wine. When we finished, we brought the crates of grapes back to his basement where the pressing and fermenting occurs. There Cliff explained to me the basics of the de-stemming machine and the presser (I know those aren’t the technical terms, but just go with me on this) as well as the fermentation process. He had several batches going, and we added yeast to two vats of red. The process is more complicated than you’d think and very technical and chemistry oriented. He showed me where he’d carefully monitored and recorded the pH, sugar content, ect of each batch, I guess since in order to make good wine and be able to sell it, it must be within certain guidelines regarding such things. I think the thing I was most struck with was how different the process is when making red wine versus white—whether or not to keep the stems in to soak, the temperature at certain processes, ect. After the basement tour I think I felt even more ignorant than when I started, but more excited about learning all about it!

Later, we toured their garden and cooked dinner. I learned wonderful things such as how grafting works, how tasty muscadine grapes are, how strong elderberry wine is, how to cut an onion properly, and how eating stinkbugs is not something I’d like to try anytime soon. All in all, a very interesting experience.