Planting Baby Vines

I've always wondered about the process of planting new vines.  One day, I hope to have my own vineyard, but I had no clue how grafted vines even arrive, or where you can buy them.  That's why I thoroughly enjoyed the process of planting new vines to replace those that didn't quite make it through the past year.  We started immediately after we finished pruning.

This is how they look in the box.

We order most of our vines from a company in New York.  They arrive in a long box, wrapped in shreds of moist newspaper and plastic wrap.  They're bound in groups of 25 and labeled with the varietal.

The same baby vines out of the box.

We take the young, grafted vines out of  the box and place them into a bucket of water.  You'd be surprised to see how much water they drink up in the short amount of time before each one is planted.

New plants in a bucket of water. It gets murky.

Then, the real back-breaking work takes place.  We dug a fairly large hole for each plant.  We dug it with shovels, no fancy tools, and we filled the hole back in with a new vine and the just-removed soil.

Only the slightest bit of the plant sticks out.

After packing the soil back over the plant, you can see just the slightest hint of the baby vine sticking out of the mound.  (See if you can find it above.)  Then, you start over.  In about 3 years, these young plants will have matured enough to provide us wine-quality grapes.  I'm excited to watch the whole process, though it will happen very slowly.

A new row of new vines.

If you swing by the winery, you can see the process of adding entire rows of new vines to our vineyard.  It's a ton of work, but it is exciting to know that we'll have more grapes to tinker with in the future.

See you at the winery,
The Winemaker's Apprentice