Start Of Something New - Building the Winery: Part 1

For those that have been following my blog, though it deals primarily with the goings on in the vineyard (and I throw in a cow or chicken story every so often), it really is all about the Winery. As logic would have it, one needs grapes to make the wine, and it takes years of work to get enough grapes to be able to harvest and produce a decent amount of wine.

We are at that time in the growth cycle to be able to think about that now. Last year was our first real harvest year (we had a couple of false starts prior) and this year promises to yield even more grapes. Going from one ton of grapes to maybe 7 or 8 tons this year will be a big jump. But the crop looks real good, and where I wasn't expecting much from the Petit Verdot and the Cabernet Sauvignon, we do expect to get some off of these vines for maybe a small quantity of a Bordeaux blend. We'll see.....we haven't reached the veriason stage yet.

So as the progress chart shows, it is now time to seriously start thinking about the winery. To confuse matters, it really isn't about the winery but the Visitor's Center. We already have a building dedicated to making wine. In it we have 14 huge stainless steel tanks, our crusher-destemmer, macrobins, our filling and bottling area, along with pallets of empty bottles waiting to be filled. What we need is an attractive place to greet customers, offer them wines to taste, and hopefully purchase some of what we've made. The Visitor's Center is our means of doing that.

In the style of a Victorian Carriage House, it blends well with our adjacent home and promotes the grandeur of the early 1900's when Harry Spratley owned the house and raised carriage horses for the New York City carriage trade. For those that are as old as I am (well, maybe as old as my Father), this is the same Harry Spratley that the song "I'm just wild about Harry" was all about. Go to YouTube and punch in the name of the song and you'll hear versions from Judy Garland et al.

The Visitor's Center will have the typical tasting room of a micro-winery, plus a function room, a gift shop, a central hallway big enough to showcase goods from other Surry County businesses, and next year a small cafe and the addition of a commercial kitchen to support weddings, functions, and meetings. This Visitor's Center has been a year in planning, and this is the year to get the building of it in motion.  Ideally, we hope to have it up and running by year's end.

Running Wire

As pictures go, this one isn't very exciting. What you are looking at is a Spinning Jenny. Don't ask me where the name came from, but I suspect it was some farmer's raw sense of humor when he designed this apparatus and named it after someone near and dear to him.

The roll of high tensile strength wire weighs about 80 pounds, and is made up of 4000' of coiled wire. As the vines grow, there is a need to add wire to the trellis to allow the tendrils to grab onto something as the vine lengthens and, theoretically conforms to a shape that the vintner thinks will provide the best pattern for vegetative as well as reproductive growth (i.e. the grapes).

These particular rows of Petit Verdot are 408' long, with each row having 68 vines planted within them. There are 6 wires required in each row, so this particular row is going to need just shy of a half mile of wire to be dragged into position and held in place by a barbed staple at each line post.

Now let's consider the weight involved. Each vine, when fully mature, will yield enough grapes to make about a half case of wine, more or less. And when you figure the liquids are about as heavy as the skins,seeds, and stems that are removed in the process, that means each vine represents a case of wine hanging in position when it comes time to harvest. So if you do the math it comes to about 1300 pounds of grapes will be hanging from these wires in just one row.

I spent the day dragging the wire for these grapes, holding on to an end and then walking down each row while inserting the wire through a staple that had been previously hammered in position.. The spinning jenny makes it an easy process, allowing the wire to unwind as it is being pulled. It was a productive thing to do, since I had sprayed them the day before; the re-entry period before I could actually continue working on the vines is over a day. It is a milestone project, for it means that next year we should start seeing a good harvest from Block 2A. The brown color you see in between the rows are the prunings I made from a prior day; the bush hog mower will shred these up and allow them to decompose and re-enter the soil.