Notes From The Winemaker

Planting Progress

My vineyard management guy, Jean-Marie Martin, has the crews out at our Annadel Estate working on the layout for the 2006 planting of Pinot Noir.

These guys are used to dealing with easier layouts. To allow Westwood to eventually develop a winery on the site I need to put a jog to the east in the middle access road. Since tractor-trailers will have to negotiate these bends they need to be broad and smooth. This means the layout for the vines has only about 10 rows that are the same length.

To make things more complicated, while the clone 777 on the west side of the central road has the same 6' x 5' spacing as the older Pinot, long ago I decided that the spacing on the east side of the road would be 6' x 4'. The 777 Pinot will be trained to bilateral cordon like the clones 115 & 667, but everything to the east -- starting with the clone 943 -- will be cane-pruned to double Guyot. It is surprising how little information on vine training is available online, but if you want to see pictures of Guyot pruning check here or here.

To make sure the crews have something easy to look forward to, I'm adding three full rows to the Grenache planting. This time I'm putting in Tablas Creek clone D to supplement the TC clones A & B already out there. I recently tasted some clonal trial wines with Neil Collins, the Tablas Creek winemaker, at the Nova Vine booth at the 2006 Unified Symposium, and the TC clone D showed extraordinarily well to me. I probably would have planted this instead of the clones A & B if the D had been available back then. Part of the risk of being an early adopter, I suppose -- the realization that release 2.0 is frequently better than 1.0.

Jean-Marie and I are meeting Friday morning to look over the layout and make sure I'm happy with it, and to resolve some irrigation and drainage issues.

posted 5/10/2006 10:10:00 AM