Backyard Chickens & Bees

Pinot noir vines in the winter storm that came through in December 2008.

Many years ago, in 1993, I started brewing my own beer. At first I was mostly just taking the simple approach and using malt extract and brewing five gallon batches, but over time I tried more complicated approaches to enhance the flavor and style I was emulating. When I bought my house in 2003, I put together an all-electric brew system and kegerator that enabled larger batches with all-grain brewing, and serving the resulting beer from a tap. This took over my basement, and was good. In parallel with the development of my brewing experience, I developed a keen taste for good red wines. This started in 1994, while living with some friends for a summer in Texas, and grew even more with every visit to my sister’s place in San Francisco (especially when we’d take trips up through Napa or Sonoma Valley).

Upon moving to Oregon in 2001, I really got into the Pinots, both Noir and Gris, being that the local wines were some of the best I had ever tasted (go find a Patricia Green and you’ll know what I’m talking about!). So, in a move to reconcile my love for these types of wine with the homebrewing of beer, I planted a small vineyard on my property in early 2006, consisting of six Pinot Noir, five Pinot Gris, and one red seedless table grape vine. The grapes are growing with the aid of a sturdy two-wire trellis that is anchored at each end with steel posts dug deep into the ground and braced with earth anchors. (Overkill? Yes.) It’s starting it third year now, and is still about two or three out from actually producing anything of note. (I did let a few bunches grow this last year, and the grapes are VERY sweet late in the season, with thick, tough skins. Should be perfect in a few years!)

There is an art in pruning the grapevines. I’m pretty sure I’ll never really have it down like the pros, but I got a good start on it last year. Everything I’ve read indicates that you should take off about 90% of any growth for the year, saving only the trunk and cordons. (Cordons are the arms that branch out along the trellis.) For my first and second years, I mostly just let all the buds that formed grow out and take over. I figured that this would give spur the roots on, since they would have so much more to feed. And there was a lot of vigorous growth this last year. So I cut it all off in the late fall and soon will go back out to nick off all but the top handful of bud, so that I can start training the branches to the trellis and maybe, in about two years, grow some grapes! The best book I have read on grape pruning is “From Vines to Wines” by Jeff Cox. It’s a complicated process to balance the amount of pruning with optimizing the vines for the best grape production.

The soil is also important to forming the grape quality. From what I gather, the more arduous the conditions of the soil, the more concentrated the flavor that will be obtained from the grape. The soil on my property is pretty much all clay and rocks. The front beds (along the sidewalk) all had to be double-dug out to mix in manure and topsoil before anything could realistically be planted. And I had to put in raised beds, both for convenience and to ensure that I had good, well-drained soil for growing the vegetables. But for the grapevines, the clay and rock is ideal! So I put them in with little modification to the surrounding area. This last year required little watering, as the roots can extend up to 6 meters and have certainly already made it deep enough to maintain themselves. I’m hoping I can avoid watering at all this year, but will have to see how it all plays out.

Of course, I have not even started to research how to make wine from the grapes. I guess you crush the grapes, ferment, age, and bottle the result. That’s another day’s work…

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