The Total Rant Fantasy: A Vineyard In The Backyard

Two vines' worth of Niagaras from El's vineyard, plus unidentified pup

Here at Rant Headquarters, we think a nice glass of wine at the end of a long day of planting is a very fine thing indeed.  And if we're feeling really elegant, we might even take a shower before-hand.

We're all good with plants, so it's impossible to look deep into a glass of Zinfandel without musing, "Maybe I could make this stuff."  Of course, if it's been three glasses, not just one, the tone is more, "Hell, I know I could make this stuff."

So when we learned that El of Fast Grow The Weeds, one of our favorite correspondents, an architect, foodie, big reader and super-intrepid gardener, actually owns an old vineyard, we asked her to write a guest rant about her experience living our fantasy:

In the fall of 2004, we became farmers.

That is not an honest statement.  In October of 2004, we bought an old farmhouse in Michigan, and it had five of its original 38 acres still attached to it.  We were Minneapolitans at the time:  my husband and I wanted to move back to be closer to our respective Chicago/Detroit families after the birth of our daughter.  Secretly, though, I, as a frustrated zone 4A city gardener, just wished to be saved from Minnesota's short growing season.

Attached to this old farmhouse was a derelict fruit farm.  Almost all farms in the area are fruit farms of some variety or other; the region is known as the Fruit Belt , after all, so it should have come as no surprise to us that one of its five acres was a vineyard.  A vineyard!  How positively romantic, I thought: we shall stomp our own grapes, make our own wine.

There are five words in the English language that, strung together, have gotten me into immense trouble throughout my life.  These words are "How hard can that be?"

I therefore undertook grape vine management with some chutzpa and aplomb that usually accompany all prideful ventures.  I figured:  these vines have been here for 80-90 years.  They have either had perfect care or they have had a combination of fickle and perfect care over those many decades:  how much harm can I do?  So, armed with my trusty Felco #8 pruners and some gloves and a hat, I set out on a windless, sunny, warm, snow-less February day and started pruning.

Don't get me wrong:  I had studied all winter, being now on nodding familiarity with such terms as "four-arm kniffen," "trunk," "cane," "node," and "spur" as understandable concepts, at least in a book.  Out I went, and I was immediately overwhelmed.  I needed to take  a deep breath, and then pull out a single cane (branch), count out 5-7 nodes (leaf bumps), then cut.  Each trunk (each grapevine) had approximately fifty such canes, so cut I did, ending up with quite a pile next to each trunk.  THEN I went in and cut out the canes, separating them one by one, so that there were only about 18 per trunk.  Whew.  Now, well, now I only had another 45 or so other grapevines to trim.

I came inside after all that work and, two days later, found I had developed the most amazing case of poison ivy.

As I look back to that first trimming, I remember how good it felt to get out of the house alone for such a long stretch of wintertime.  It was not hard work, really, but it required my concentration.  I put in all this hard work, and I had no idea even what KIND of grapes these were.

We found out later that year that the grapes were slipskin juice grapes.  Yep:  This farm, like tons of others in the area, supplied grapes to Welch's, the grape juice company.  So the majority of the grapevines are Concords, or purple jam grapes, with the rest being Niagaras, or white juice grapes.  Both varieties are American grapes: variants of Vitis labrusca, the native fox grape. 

In the U.S., until the early 1960s or so, the grape of choice for wine grapes were American cultivars.  It's only since then, thanks to clever California growers, that the European grape, Vitis vinifera, began to be readily grown and cultivated as wine grapes.  It seems there were many attempts to cultivate V. vinifera before the '60s in this country, but there were also as many failures.

So it was with some chagrin that we harvested our first year's crop:  what good are these things, except for jam and juice, I thought.  (Can't we, you know, make wine?)  Admittedly, we had taken a somewhat laissez-faire attitude toward the grapes that year:  let us see what bugs get them before we resort to bug warfare.  My husband did set out some rather effective Japanese beetle traps, but whether they simply attracted bugs to them to be trapped or actually moved the bugs away from the grapes remained a mystery.

The second year, an April frost hit, killing all the new grape blossoms.

This year, though, we had done more homework.  My husband had spread milky spore around the root systems of the grapes the autumn before.  We had diligently pruned and mulched and weeded around the vines.  And, once the Japanese beetles showed up in July, my husband sprayed some kaolin clay on the leaves, creating an unpalatable barrier for the beetles.  He reapplied it once after one heavy rain.  We had a banner harvest.  Two vines yielded a 60-pound wheelbarrowload of grapes for the house.  We have about ten gallons of frozen juice in our chest freezer, prefrozen in small three-person portions, for use all winter.  There is more jam downstairs that we can eat.  And we had the middle school kids at our daughter's school come and pick the rest.  They made juice out of them, too, selling the jars for $4/quart.

But no wine for us yet.  I need to psych myself up for a whole new series of terms:  carboy, mast, yeast, hydrometer...the winter is long, and there's always next season.  Winemaking:  How hard can that be?

Comments

[susan harris]

Thanks, El - that was great. Now I'll show my ignorance: "juice grapes" means they make lousy wine, or not at all, or what?

[Tibs]

Any fruit can make wine, maybe just not the caliber of wine you want. Try using some of your frozen juice to make wine, start out with a kit, attend classes. And the squeezings or what ever you call the left over stuff is great for the compost pile.

There is nothing better than a concord grape pie.

[El]

Tibs is right, Susan: any grape at all can make wine, but with Concords and Niagaras, think more Manischewitz than Chateau Lafite. No offense to either, frankly; we simply have had our tongues "conditioned" to like that European grape. SO I think there's hope for us in changing back to American; it just will take a bit more drinking!

(Oh, and that pooch in the picture is Penny, our overly ambitious blue heeler.)

[eliz]

Great post!

So there's no way you can replace some of these with the vinifera vines? You seem to have learned so much dealing with these vines.

That said, there are some well-liked wineries in the Niagara region that do make wine from the Niagara variety of labrusca. It might be worth your while to check them out and get their strategies.

Here's the url: niagarawinetrail.org

[Bri]

Thanks for this post el. I followed the link from your site. I once hear someone say, "How do you make a million dollars from a vineyard? Spend 10 million." Best wishes on your grape adventure.

[Leslie]

El, thoroughly enjoyable read ... you know grape juice isnn't all that bad ...

[kelly]

Excellent post, El! I loved following along as you harvested this summer, and appreciate the way you rounded out the story here with some past and future, as well as some factoids.

Can't wait to read more next year.

[Brent]

Wonderful story!

I'm a wine fancier, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say that there is a lambrusco renaissance going on, the wine has enjoyed a mild resurgence in recent years. I wouldn't hesitate to try to make some wine from your grapes.

note: second post. First seemed no to go through