(Ross Courtney/The Good Fruit Grower)
A father-daughter duo in a rocky part of the Walla Walla Valley obtained bored with restarting their vines after deep winter freezes.
So Steve Robertson and his daughter, Brooke Delmas Robertson, devised a brand new coaching system that permits them to guard their vines and harness the warmth radiating from the cobblestone soil attribute of The Rocks District American Viticultural Space, a small portion of sculpted northeast Oregon. of the bigger AVA surrounding Walla Walla Valley.
They name it mini head-trained, and it got here after three deep winter chilly occasions between 2007 and 2017 that worn out its shoots. Every pressured them to restart the coaching from scratch.
“We won’t hold doing this,” they mentioned to one another, Brooke recalled.
With the purpose of acquiring world-class wines, they thought of the frequent means of restructuring their vineyards to be unsustainable as a result of the vines would change into unbalanced over time.
Borrowing from an extended historical past of mind coaching around the globe, Brooke got here up with the concept of pruning the goblet-shaped vines 12 to twenty inches from the bottom, with two shoots in every of three to 5 planting positions. the outer spurs, creating an open “zombie hand” form protruding of the bottom. After the harvest, the crews bury the top and spurs of every vine to guard them from winter injury.
Stroll by the winery in winter and you will solely see the dormant canes ready to be pruned protruding above the floor of every vine’s lined crown.
The low, three-dimensional wood construction retains the fruit near the bottom to benefit from the warmth radiating from the rocky floor. That permits the Robertsons to hurry up ripening and guarantee fruit comes out in early October, earlier than early frost occasions.
“It has every part to do with the rocks,” Brooke mentioned.
The Rocks District is a 6-square-mile part of rocky soil, a whole lot of ft deep in locations, created the place the Walla Walla River started to broaden its alluvial fan 15,000 years in the past. The river carries basalt rocks from the Blue Mountains and deposits them all through the district.
To irrigate, they use a 24-inch-tall drip line and place emitters between every vine, spaced 4 ft aside, to stop extra moisture from affecting the fruit whereas the roots go deep into the rocky soil. on the lookout for water.
The household transformed all of its blocks to crimson varieties—Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre—in 2017, after a winter that dropped temperatures to minus 12 levels Celsius and prompted 70 % bud dying.
As for his or her Viognier vineyards, they’d at all times used cane burial. However after 2017, they moved from the upright shoot place to a double guyot cane pruning system. Additionally they lowered the peak of the top from 32 to twenty-eight inches to benefit from the warmth of the rock, simply not as intensely as within the crimson varieties.
Their mini handbook coaching system requires expertise pruning, for which they’ve educated work crews, and modified tractor-pulled plows and discs to bury in late fall. But it surely requires fewer passes by the winery throughout the season. The system wants minimal leaf and shoot thinning as a result of the open construction already permits gentle penetration, he mentioned. In the meantime, after the primary two years of transition, yields have returned to 3-3.5 tons per acre, just like what the household would get from a VSP.
The household, which makes wine below the Delmas label, began their vineyards in 2007 after Steve and his spouse, Mary Delmas Robertson, moved from Napa, California.
Kevin Pogue, a professor of geology at Whitman Faculty in close by Walla Walla, has measured the impact of radiation on basalt rocks, which attain floor temperatures of as much as 140 levels Fahrenheit within the peak of summer time.
That warmth radiates upward about 2 ft up, he mentioned, so vintners who need to benefit from that sometimes decrease their trellises or followers. That warmth radiation will hasten maturity and permit growers to reap earlier than the autumn frosts that the flat rising district experiences, he mentioned. Radiant warmth additionally dissipates shortly at evening.
On rocks, growers usually skip cowl crops in driving rows. They do not want it, he mentioned, no less than to not forestall erosion.
“Cobblestones the scale of baseballs do not blow away,” he mentioned.
—by Ross Courtney
