We were sitting outside the barn looking out over our vineyard. If you get the right angle and distance it doesn’t look too bad as perhaps you can see in the photo above. From the right angle you can’t see the dead vines or that there are no grapes on the ones that are still alive.
So there we were on a sunny, Sunday afternoon drinking a glass of wine, although sadly not our own, when my neighbour from across the valley rocked up with his two children. He is the neighbour who has planted 1000 vines on the estate he is gamekeeper for. He accepted a glass of wine and we started talking about vineyards.
The day before I had driven up to his place to have a look at his newly-planted vines. Although only a few months old, they looked very nice. He is everything I am not – neat, methodical and very keen to do things right. Oh and also he is on-site. I.e. he lives next to the vineyard. I, on the other hand, am sloppy, careless and live an hour’s drive away from our vineyard.
Unsurprisingly we fell to talking about our respective vineyards. He had been spraying at the first sign of any mildew, mowing, weed-killing and generally taking advice from the man he bought his vines from and his uncle in Switzerland who owns large acreage of vineyards in that country.
I had been either asking my man to keep the grass down and a little weed-killing but mostly spending money or idling away my time waiting for a better year next year. We’re not going to get any grapes again this year and for totally different reasons to last year, so all the jobs that I might have been doing at this time of year, if we had grapes, are not happening. So it’s OK to be idle.
That said, it was nice to take the opportunity of going through with my neighbour all the things that had gone wrong this year and all the mistakes I had made. It was, if you like, a kind of grape-growers therapy session. Well for me at any rate.
Although it was, in one sense, painful I tried to identify to him everything that had been a problem. There was plenty to go at. Starting with the problems we had last year and the grey rot on the Rondo. Whether it was just a coincidence that we had the trunk disease issues with the same Rondo this year, I do not know. I haven’t had a satisfactory answer to my questions about why trunk disease and why now. Maybe there isn’t such an answer.
There seems to be a fair degree of agreement among the experts that vines under stress are more susceptible to disease. There is no question that our location places the vines under considerable stress. Probably the wind, despite our efforts to provide them with wind-breaks, is the main stress factor.
In much the same category was the weather at the beginning of the year. After weeks of rain we then went into a long period of drought. I don’t think this would affect the mature vines (like the ones that got trunk disease) but it was certainly possible it affected the younger (two year old) vines at the top of the vineyard.
And if you wanted to begin to put together the perfect storm of problems I began to worry that I had not paid enough attention to how I had planted these. It’s possible that I hadn’t taken the trouble to make sure the roots went downwards by pulling the new vine up a little out of the soil when planting. If I had left them with the roots spreading horizontally and, as young vines with those roots near the surface, then they would have been much more susceptible to the drought. This might well explain why the young Madeline Angevines died. I haven’t exhumed the dead ones to test this theory, but I will.
But not the six year old Rondos. For them the possible explanation is something connected to the grey rot last year. Or the fact that one explanation of how trunk disease happens is that it happens when the vine is subject to injury. The disease then has direct access to the central system of the plant.
One type of injury is that which happens when somebody (that would be me) is careless with their pruning. A ragged cut not then disinfected, for example. I’m doing that now (disinfecting) but talk about stable doors and horses bolting. If this explanation is true then my cavalier / careless attitude to vineyard hygiene has cost me dear. The words, if you’re growing grapes at the margins you can’t afford to make mistakes, float back to me over the years. Chalk this up as another of my mistakes.
Another possible error on my part related to vineyard hygiene is not burning the pruned bits of the vine having cut them off. Leaving them lying around in the vineyard is an invitation for disease to spread. It wasn’t that we didn’t pick up (most) of the prunings but I’d then save the clippings to use as kindling for the fire in the barn. They make great kindling when they’ve dried out for a year but that means they’re lying around for that period of time. Doesn’t sound too clever does it when you put it like that.
If you throw into this melting pot of mistakes an unavoidable factor, that of the Covid 19 lockdown so that for several months we were unable to visit the vineyard and maybe notice that the young plants needed water. I did ask my man to water the very young ones I’d planted in early spring but not the two-year old ones. I could have been wiser in this instance but that’s a facile thought.
Another lockdown-related issue was not being able to apply winter fertiliser as I have for the last 5 years. There’s no doubt that, looking at the vines that have survived, they do look under-nourished compared with last year. But here again I may simply be being wise after the event. 20 / 20 hindsight.
All this and not even a mention of rabbits killing the vines. I have taken steps to prevent this source of stress. The rabbits eat round the trunk of the vine and kill the mature ones stone dead. But it feels like I’ve protected the vines from the rabbits so something even more deadly can get to them.
So all this in more garbled fashion as my neighbour and I sat looking over what was left of our vineyard. The day after I started to make a record of what was alive and what was dead so I could compare with the chart I made last year at this time. No need to have a colour for those vines with grapes (red last year) because we didn’t have any grapes. I’ll put up this year’s chart in my next blog. That will give me a more objective view of 2020. Whether that helps or not I’m not sure.