In another selection from The Story of Wine in California, M.F.K. Fisher offers a primer on proper vineyard management that is useful even today. From pruning the vines to praying that it doesn’t get too hot or cold, much happens before harvest.
THERE ARE MANY OLD VINEYARDS IN CALIFORNIA, and some of them still harbor the ancient gnarled vines that for decades have grown to give, every year, their miraculous fruit.
Mostly, though, even the oldest vineyards have been replanted during the past fifty years, and each spring sees the carefully bared earth and the straight rows of little, dark, new roots on another hillside that may for years have been abandoned, or, along the roads, the black piles of old roots that have been pulled out to make way for fresh and probably finer stock.
The first European vineyardists in California, after the Spaniards, planted high into the hills and mountains when they could, for that was the way vines had always grown in their own countries. In Italy and France and Germany the rich bottomlands were saved for other crops which could not be cultivated in the high, steep meadows.
Even today there can be seen in California an occasional ancient vineyard high on a hill, but still sending out its yearly leafage. Below the tired old stock will be a vineyard in its full maturity, with thicker leaves and bigger clusters of heavy fruit. And below it, puny and naked alongside the old plantings, will be a clean vineyard of young vines, just staked, waiting for its first harvest.
Gustave Flaubert once wrote, “He who plants a vine becomes entangled in its branches.” All wine men know this. Once they have prepared their soil and planted new stock, its roots become like their own, and their hearts are in its growth and flowering, as if it were part of their life stream. It is perhaps this inextricable tangle of earth and man that makes vineyards different from other kinds of fields and orchards, more intimately a part of the human beings who nurture them.
In these present days, new stock is ordered on the advice, not only of the seasoned vineyardists who may want to improve and perfect their crops, but of highly trained experts from the farm advisors of the Agricultural Extension Service or of the University of California.
Every tiny root and cutting is inspected and controlled: a sick one might endanger vast areas, not only in this state but throughout the whole wine-growing world.
The earth into which the stock must go is equally well known to its examiners, and so is the weather, the exposure, the normal expectation of hazards.
Most of all, the planter steels himself to the unpredictable, the unforeseen.
Then the roots go in.
The vines, once planted in their carefully chosen soil, are tended month in and month out with all the patience and tenderness of a parent, and it is part truth that some wine men are teased about knowing each little vine by a pet name.
The seasons pass, and usually in the fall of the first year it is time for chip budding. All the ritual of this solemn adventure is carried out with quick, surgical gestures, in which the original sturdy root loses its first identity and assumes its new name for its lifetime.
From then on, it will be called a Semillion, a Pinot Chardonnay, or even a Palomino or Alicante.
Its stake will support it during the young slender years. Made of the best wood, it may still rot from the earth long before the vine itself is too old to stop its annual yields, or it may stand there, firmly entwined by the gnarled trunk and roots, until both are torn from the soil to make a way for new stock.
Some of the finer varieties like the Cabernets, depending on their habits, are trained along wires between the stakes. These support their new growth each year, which if let go every-which-way would produce not a single grape cluster on the too long canes.
Pruning copes with all this, and is done in the late autumn or the spring as artfully as the initial budding of each vine. It is one of the rites which so far have not been taken over entirely by machinery: a man’s sure, firm, knowing touch must choose the spot to clip through, so that a vine will produce its best at harvest time—a few beautiful clusters and not a weedy tangle of half-developed fruit.
Then, the soil is kept clean until after the harvests. More and more machinery is used, delicately adjusted to go between the rows of leafy vines without damaging them, but men still use the timeless hoe for chopping down interlopers next to the roots.
And the rest is waiting—and praying.
When the grapevines are in full flower, the air seems heavy with the perfume of wild honey. The wine men keep an eye on the weather, and pray for clear skies. They breathe easier, once the self-pollinated grapes are set.
From then on, the fruit fills out and ripens according to the temperatures, the rainfall, the health of the soil—in other words, by God’s grace mostly.
It is usually necessary to spray or dust against mildew. In some sections overhead irrigating saves the grapes from sunburn.
And in full summer, when the sugar content in the ripening grapes shows that they will soon be ready to harvest, they hang full and heavy on the strong branches, and it seems probable indeed that in the quiet of the night they can be heard to swell with juice, as the Chinese who used to work by moonlight in the vineyards of Napa Valley once believed.