Independence Day at the Vineyard

Happy Independence Day.

I am celebrating it by being at the vineyard at 5:30 a.m. to join farmworkers pruning grape plants.

There is life outside of politics.

Yesterday my nephew and I finished pruning the two acres of Cabernets.

Liam Flenniken, age 17. He did most of the work. He will be a senior at Lincoln High School in Portland this fall.

I grow a few melons out of love and inertia. Here is what a cantaloupe vine looks like at age four weeks. The vine will double in size every five days. By the end of July it will be a thick mass of vines.

Cantaloupe, two feet across

Watermelon, two feet across. the tendrils grow several inches a day..

The big job today is pruning the suckers out of the base of the grape vines. and getting the vines secure between the two sets of upper wires. With melons, big, lush vines mean healthy melons. With grapes, lush vines mean more work. One builds a healthy grape plant by what one removes.

This is a healthy pinot noir, in need of pruning. Adelbert Paz examines the job.

Adelbert Paz

He is fast. He pulls and snaps off the suckers and cleans up with clippers.

With job finished, here are the vines taken off that plant:

I am still doing some jobs at the vineyard: planting replacement grape vines, hoeing weeds, moving pipes, and walking the field to check the irrigation drips. I prune some, but pruning means getting down low onto one’s knees to trim suckers and then getting up to go to the next plant. Doing a few is easy, but there are 2,000 Cabernets, 2,000 Malbecs, and 4,000 Pinot Noirs. The hundredth time -- one long row -- getting up is too hard.

The vineyard is on the part of the farm with deep pumice soil. It is fine-grained and when tilled it is the consistency of powder snow or powdered sugar. You can see the deep footprints in the photos. The grape roots should find it easy to extract the unique characteristics of the terroir. Ideally, it will make excellent wine. Next year, when I will have grapes to sell in quantity, I will water less to get less foliage and to make the grape vines struggle more, toward the goal of richer, more concentrated grape flavor.

Happy July 4th.