Fall Crush Order

It's official. We just put in an order for 400 lbs of of red and white grapes through MDCrush in Mt. Airy, Maryland. This will be our first attempt at making wine from fresh Virginia grapes and will be the first of hopefully many successful vintages.

Our preliminary order consists of 100 lbs of Vidal Blanc, 200 lbs of Carbernet Franc, and 100 lbs of Merlot. According to Rob, a really laid back guy who runs the operation, the White grapes usually come in sometime in September and the Red grapes sometime in October. The time frames can be pretty broad and they usually only have a week window of when the harvest will actually take place. This is primarily due to the overall seasonal conditions, and when the vineyards think it is ideal to harvest the grapes. As with many things in business - sans WalMart - we are at the beck and call of our suppliers.

According to Rob, each 100 lbs order should net us approximately 6 gallons of wine, give or take. However, as Rob noted and I have found out, there is often a lot of variance on this amount, based on grape and cluster size at harvest, how hard you press the grapes, and how much is lost during racking and aging. Rob was quick to point out that we can always add a few pounds if need be to round up our supplies as close to 6 gallons as possible.

As Mike mentioned in the previous post we will be making a standalone white, Vidal Blanc, which should be ready to drink by fall or winter of 2009. The Red wine, which will actually be a blend of the Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon is our Ebrietas reserve and should be available in 2010, so get your order in soon!

Details on how you can get your hands on some of Fraser Hall Wine Company's first vintage will be coming soon.

Fungicide

I bought three fungicides yesterday to spray on the vines: Mancozeb, JMS Stylet Oil and Agri-Fos. Agri-Fos is a commercial name for phosphorous acid. According to one internet source, Phosphorous acid kills downy mildew and helps to preclude new growth by stimulating plants to develop their own defense mechanism (dont ask me how they do that). JMS Stylet Oil is a white mineral oil that treats powdery mildew pre and post infection. Stylet Oil also has insecticide properties. Mancozeb controls for downy mildew, botrytis and black rot.

All three come as a concentrate that is mixed into a gallon of water and applied through a sprayer. Our sprayer is a small hand pump one.

The concensus on a grape growing message board was that our vines are fighting with mildew and this is stunting their growth. We should have been spraying for mildew from the start of the summer, but ignorance got the best of us.

Our trip down to Culpeper last weekend, July 26, was sobering. The vines look OK, but most have some serious issues. Many have new, impressive growth, but wilted older leaves that look sick. The Vidal Blanc vines look much better than the Cab Franc. I'm sure this is because Vidal Blanc is much more resilient in the face of disease pressure and their location on the hill is further from the trees.

Results of the fungicide soon. Try not to fall over while you are on the edge of your seat.

Also, we have found a source of Virginia grapes that will sell in quantities less than a half ton. We had only found one source prior to this most recent discovery that would sell us anything under one ton (1/2 ton). This exception would still mean an almost $900 investment in grapes. Not to mention the work required to crush, ferment, press and age 1000 lbs of grapes.

So, now we can buy a few hundred pounds of one or two different varieties and try our hand at winemaking!

Mildew: Its not just in your shower

We should have known that we would not be the exception to the rule.

We started to notice that some of our Cab Franc vines were looking a little rough; their leaves were starting to turn colors, shrivel up and fall off. It could have been the grow tubes. It could also be mildew. I noticed some mildew on a few leaves in the past, but disregarded it as an aberration and went about my business. Now it seems that those infected leaves may have spread mildew to others.

Mildew is not particular to Virginia, but it is prevalent because of the humidity. Most vineyards have to spray a variety of fungicides to keep the mildew under control. The problem doesn't end there, however, because the number of mildews and fungicides are many.

The three most common types of mildew are powdery, downy and phomopsis. Each produces distinct symptoms and affects the vine differently. The mildew can be ID'ed based on the discoloration of the leaf and the side of the leaf that hosts the midew spores.

Mildew is treated various ways; the constant being that the treatment regimen must vary. Mildew adapts quickly to one type of fungicide if used extensively. In fact, most fungicide instructions recommend at most two consecutive applications and no more than four the entire season.

The fungicide that we found locally was neem oil based. Neem oil is an organic treatment that specifically targets powdery mildew. It was applied on July 19, 2008. The results seem good so far. We are travelling down to Culpeper on Saturday, July 26 to see for ourselves.

Pictures and updated blathering will follow.

This is starting to look like a real vineyard!

Evaluation of Sevin

We hesitated to use Sevin on our vines, but changed out minds as soon as we saw the damage that would be done by the Japanese Beetles. So far Sevin seems to be fairly effective at preventing massive damage by JB. The end of May brought swarms of newly developed JB and they immediately started attacking the leaves on the vines. An application of liquid Sevin killed any JB that ate at the leaves and, we hope, dissuaded others from even attempting.

On the July 4th weekend I had a chance to look over the vines and inspect the JB damage. I found that some vines had many dead beetles around the base and some had very few. I dont know why some vines are targeted and others not. It may be that the targeted ones were simply chosen randomly at first or chosen because they had particularly attractive leaves and the other JB just followed suit. This would make sense because JB excrete a substance while feeding that attracts other beetles to the location. None of the vines had serious damage. Many had a few leaves that had holes in them.

While I was walking down the rows I did see a few beetles who were munching on the leaves. The interesting thing was that every JB that was actively eating, or, I presume, had been eating was acting strange. Most of the JB were hanging on only by one arm and one leg; the rest of their body was flailing in an effort to stay on the leaf. It was funny and satisfying because I interpreted this as the poison working. I dont wish death on anything, but I can make an exception for the JB; especially considering that it serves no purpose and offers no value to nature.

The JB that were fimly attached, and, I assume, not eating, I grabbed, threw to the floor and quickly ended their lives with my shoe.

My first impression is that the Sevin is working well. There are few JB attempting to feast on the leaves and those that do die quickly before much damage can be done. Most of the leaves are still green and healthy with little damage. The leaves outside of the grow tubes are starting to flourish, while the leaves inside the grow tubes are starting to die or turn odd colors (this fact convinced us to start taking the grow tubes off b/c eventually we will remove the leaves from the trunk anyways). I did still see activity in the vineyard from other insects and animals. I saw a few frogs and many spiders and flies. I was scared at first that the Sevin would drive the beneficial insects and animals away, but so far the impact has appeared to be minimal.

The negative to Sevin is the impact that it has on life in the vineyard. I found a few dead Ladybugs around the vines last weekend. I dont know whether their death can be attributed to Sevin, but it does seem like it could be more than a mere coincidence. I had hoped to maintain a healthy balance of pest and beneficial insect. I have no idea if the Sevin is driving beneficial insects away, which will lead to an influx of pests. I am also concerned about the Sevin getting into the ground and into the roots of the vines. The vines wont bear fruit for two more years, but I fear that there might be some lasting effects of using Sevin that show up in the fruit sometime down the road.

Overall we could not have made it through the summer without the Sevin. Later this summer we will apply some Milky Spore to try and kill as many grubs as possible to obviate the need for Sevin next summer. We will also experiment with Neem oil next year and see how that works.

Next up:

Pruning and training the vines.

July 5th

A wide shot of the vineyard with the first hang wire up and the grow tubes off the lowest row.

Another wide shot. The grass looks better from far away. Up close it is mostly crab grass.

We decided to leave the grow tubes off one row to see what happens. It may be time to let them breathe. Now we will find out if we have small or large animals that have been waiting patiently with baited breath.

A shot of the new wires. We put them 3.5 feet off the ground. Almost every vine can touch this first wire.

Here is a Gripple! A Gripple is a fencing tool that makes hanging wires and fencing a piece of cake. In this case, the wire can be pulled through the Gripple one way, but not the other. This makes tightening the wires simple and keeps the appropriate tension. You tighten the wires with a Gripple Fastening Tool (AKA Grippleator), which is as awesome as it sounds.

We drilled a small hole in each midpost to run the wire through. Some use staples because they want to be able to remove the wires during certain parts of the year. We are going for a more simple system.

This is the tallest vine. As you can see it is almost 6 feet tall.

Rain barrel number two. This area was home to a 3.5 foot black snake that we caught and released into the woods to the protest of one of Mother Nature's biggest detractors.

The PVC pipe coming out of the barrel is our intepretation of an overflow drain. In this case, excess water will be directed back into the original drain spout and into the french drain in the yard.

Water coming off the roof and into the gutters will now go into the rain barrel. There is a screen on the opening to keep out bugs and debris.

On Friday the rain barrel on the left side of the house filled up in 10 minutes. Now that filling them up is not a problem, we need to address the issue of storing all of this water somewhere to be delivered to the vines.