Water

We're currently in a drought in the Bluegrass.  As someone who just moved here, I never expected a drought.  I assumed that being known for luscious grass meant that there would be more than enough water for everything.  Maybe there will be in the future, but the past few weeks have been really dry.  Too dry for our vines.  Lack of water creates all kinds of problems in a vineyard, as well as all kinds of colors.

This past week, we decided to take matters into our own hands.  We're not large enough to have any sort of industrial watering system.  I'm not even sure we have water pressure for anything like that, even if we could rent one.  So, instead, we built something that we could fill with water, pull behind one of our tractors, and distribute some water to our plants.  Here's what that ended up looking like.

Our tank holds roughly 300 gallons of water.  Unfortunately, we couldn't come up with a contraption small enough to fit through all of our rows.  So, we had to skip approximately 16 of the rows.  Hopefully it will rain soon to help those rows, in particular.  We made sure to concentrate our efforts on new/young plants, since they seem to be struggling the most.  It takes almost an hour to fill this tank with water.  So, The Wizard had the idea of driving it to a nearby water utility service and filling it up for about a dollar in what seemed like seconds.  Here's what he looked like alongside Old Richmond Road in his trek back to the vineyard.

 

He'll be comin' 'round the mountain...

I swear to you, I thought he was going to get pulled over for dragging that rickety, old trailer full of water down the highway. As he was leaving, he told me to get on the back and ride with. No thank you. I opted to time him, instead. He pulled off the whole trip in 20 minutes. I think we decided that it wasn't worth paying to save 30 minutes of time, when we could take the time between full tanks to do things around the winery.

So, if you're an advocate of Kentucky Wine.  Do a little rain dance for us!
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Phylloxera

Phylloxera - the closest thing to a dirty word that can be spoken in a vineyard.

If you are any sort of wine history enthusiast, the word Phylloxera will send shivers down your spine.  Root phylloxera (it is important to emphasize root as opposed to leaf phylloxera) devastated French winemaking in the 1850s and '60s.

So, you can begin to understand the initial panic when we found an outbreak of leaf phylloxera on one of our plants, smack-dab in the middle of our rows of Moscato.  Here's what some of the leaves on that single plant looked like:

If you turn either of those leaves over, each white spot corresponds to a small, fuzzy, wart-like "gall".  (Remember crown gall?)  These galls do little damage, other than make the vines ugly.  However, since the thought of having any form of phylloxera around is nerve-racking, we decided to strip all of the leaves off of this vine and quickly remove them from the vineyard.

Grape phylloxera is a microscopic, aphid-like insect native to eastern North America, so it's not uncommon to come across it in Kentucky.  The French wine disaster of the 19th century pioneered an entire field of root grafting in order to fight off these small pests.  Since native American vines grew resistant to root phylloxera, French grapevines were grafted to North American rootstocks.  This has been the best defense against the little buggers, and grafted vines are used throughout phylloxera-known regions to this day, but it hasn't been perfect.  In the 1980s, California discovered that one of their most common rootstocks, AXR1, was no longer resistant to phylloxera and had to replant over 60% of the vines in Napa and Sonoma Valleys over 2 decades.

I first learned about phylloxera back in 2007 when I was regularly listening to the Napa Valley Wine Radio podcast.  Nancy Hawks-Miller, the wine educator at Goosecross Cellars in Yountville, CA, at the time, was responsible for most of my wine education up until 2010 or so when I decided to start studying on my own.  You can listen to the 5-year-old podcast about phylloxera here.

After spending a whole post telling you how awful phylloxera is, I just wanted to reiterate that our vineyard is in no real danger.  We have root phylloxera-resistant rootstocks, and we have a close eye on any developments from their leaf phylloxera cousins.

I had no clue that a wine podcast I listened to during my first year of engineering grad school would matter to me at all later in life,
The Winemaker's Apprentice