Vineyard 74 : Beginning to take some action

I realise it’s not a month since I posted the last vineyard  blog but to be honest there’s so much going off that I need to get some of it at least, out there. So here we go. Sad to say what’s going off is not what a vineyard owner, albeit a modest one, would want to have happening at this point in early August.

But, as they say, if life gives you lemons then make lemonade. Not perhaps the best analogy but it kind of applies if you can ignore that there’s no lemons and indeed no grapes either. So instead of what I might wish was happening, flowers into fruit, fruit growing and then ripening. None of this is happening.

What I have, as a replacement, is serious remedial work on our vines. Surgery it’s called. I’ll write more about this actual process next time. This at a simple level, involves cutting back diseased wood until it’s all gone. Not as easy as it sounds. In some cases your ‘down’ pretty much to ground level until all signs of Esca (a form of trunk disease, the champagne of all vineyard diseases) have disappeared. In some cases all the cutting back reveals is that the vine is indeed dead, defunct, deceased, moribund etc. Just like the Dead Parrot sketch from Python.

Having cut it back we have to disinfect the cut and anything left of the vine. Not to mention cleaning the saw and secateurs if used, in between each cut with disinfectant wipes. It requires a level of cleanliness and general fastidiousness that don’t come naturally to me – at all. All this and no guarantee of success.

And if all this sounds, as I say, pretty simple, then let me tell you it hasn’t been. Just to get to the point at which this drastic, not to say unnatural, action can be taken, has been extremely challenging (nice word). I mentioned in the last blog that we were employing an agronomist to help us and it’s been good to have his advice even if he would be the first to admit this is a new area of developing skills for him.

Fair enough just so long as we’re honest about the nature of the contract between us, that’s fine. As I said to him I don’t look to you to be a complete expert just that you know more than me (not difficult I’ll admit). He will agree that he’s learning along with us. He’d be hard-pressed to find another vineyard to compare this one with even if he chose to. He does go back to base and reads up on stuff and send stuff off to the lab and talk to other colleagues. So he’s upskilling to coin a phrase.

What’s puzzling to us both is why here, why now, why this version? Reading the very complex article he sent me, written in Spain (not Spanish) about the disease, provides some ideas but that’s the problem then – too many ideas. One of the articles is just about young vines so there’s all the highly contentious (for the companies that import the vines) explanations about the disease getting in during the grafting process, or the storage situation after grafting and prior to shipping.

Then in the article, we’ve got possible explanations such as blocked xylem vessels leading to a lack of water and insufficient nutrients. Yes, I am trying to keep this simple. Not implausible as we did have several weeks of drought in the spring and this would affect the younger vines. But not, I would have thought, the mature ones whose roots are supposed to be way down where there is always moisture. So a partial explanation, maybe.

Then there’s ‘environmental’ factors such as malnutrition (I didn’t feed them this winter); poor drainage (really don’t think so, we have well-drained soil); soil compaction (possible when you look at the ground); heavy crop load on young plants (definitely not); planting in poorly prepared soil and improper plant holes (yes, I don’t do much preparation at all other than to dig a hole which out of laziness is probably too small). And that’s just one extract / set of explanations, admittedly the most straight-forward one I could find, but an extract nonetheless.

Finally for me, at this stage, there’s disease getting in through cuts, lesions, scars and general damage. I’d be the first to admit that we’re pretty casual when it comes to pruning etc. I suppose I had always thought that vines were quite hardy. Wouldn’t living in the exposed Yorkshire Dales make them more so? Or kill them of course. Right now seems like the latter.

Incidentally I’ve mentioned before belonging to the WineGB association which I’ve seen people turn to when they have a problem // question to be answered. I photographed two of our young vines with a cut-through section and asked what they thought. I got only two replies*. One probably trying to be helpful and the other the company who had sold us these particular vines. They both seemed to contradict each other. In terms of the responses, I was not impressed partly with quality but most definitely not with quantity of response. Is this why I pay my fees? Not important enough I suppose.

The company that did respond possibly were worried I was going to blacken their good name. Which I had no intention of doing as I hadn’t put the name of the company in the post. This was in the ‘it could have come with the vines’ theory (what we used to call the with-in child model of behaviour problems) rather than contracted whatever when it got here (the environmental model). As they not unreasonably pointed out if it had been the former then the other million pinot noir they’d planted would have the same problem, so fair point. They offered to replace any that die next year when planting for free.

So there we have it, between inexperience, indifference, complexity and so on, it’s all been quite tricky. I’m out of words now so next time I’ll write about our agronomist’s plan for the way forward.

*As I was writing this Tuesday morning I got another response. He said contact your vine provider. I pointed out that they had already contacted me. Life can be so neat at times.

PS. One good thing to emerge from all this is me having an excuse to buy a new toy, two new toys in fact. The specialist saws in picture above. Who says every dark cloud etc. By the way the fact they’re different has nothing to do with sexism but they only had one of each.