So You Want to Plant a Vineyard, part I

Have you ever wondered what it takes to plant a vineyard in Sonoma or Napa County? Have you sometimes thought of buying property in the wine county, planting a scenic vineyard below your house, and enjoying the sound of rustling grape leaves in the evening breeze while you watch the sun dip below the hills with a glass of wine in your hand? If that’s the case, we’ll spare you the expense ($$) and you can live vicariously through us for the next 2 years. We are in the process of designing and installing a 1.6-acre Pinot Noir vineyard on our new property in Sebastopol.

Find some land

I’ll leave the house project to another blog, but what does it take to plant a vineyard in Sonoma Co. First, you’ll need land. You’ll often hear the term “site, soil, clone” when talking to a winemaker or vineyard manager. This means, find a suitable planting site first (if you know what varietal you want to plant, then that will limit your search). You may have dreams of growing cabernet sauvignon, or chardonnay, or zinfandel—or maybe all three on your property. But before settling on a varietal, you need to know what varietal is best suited for your site. The three varietals I listed above require vastly different climates to thrive (cool-moderate-hot). In fact, it would be hard, if not impossible, to find a single site that could grow all three varietals extremely well. With that in mind your first goal is to find a site you can afford. For us, that turned out to be the Sebastopol Hills just west of Sebastopol, CA on the ‘Goldridge’ line. This soil is perfectly suited for pinot noir and has a very cool-to-temperate climate You may already own land or want to plant near your existing house. Find out what grows well in your area from local growers or if you have wineries in your area. If not, UC Davis has a soil database that will tell you what soil you have for any location in the US. From there you can ask a nursery or grapevine nursery what does well in your soil.

https://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/gmap/

Permitting

You have the land, you have adequate soil (more on this in a bit), and you have an ample water supply (with new water restrictions, you cannot plant in areas deemed scarce for water). Congratulations! But now comes permitting before you even think about putting a vine in the ground. For winegrowing regions, like Sonoma and Napa, you’ll need a permit to plant your vineyard. In Sonoma Co. that’s anything larger than 0.5 acres. In Napa Co. it’s anything larger than 5.0 acres. In Sonoma Co. this requires both a Vineyard & Orchard Site Development (VESCO) permit and an Agricultural Grading & Drainage permit (Napa is similar but has diQerent names). But, before you can apply for these permits, you’ll need a few reports done first:

1. Biological Report – what plant and animal species are located at the site and any mitigation measures needed to either manage or co-exist with those species, especially threatened or endangered species. In Sonoma Co. it’s the dreaded Tiger Salamander. If they are around, you are not planting a vineyard!

2. Soils Report – what soil is on site? Is it toxic? Does it need mitigation (e.g. erosion control)? This will also tell you what you’ll need to do to the soil, if anything, for optimal growing conditions of grapevines.

3. Civil Engineering report – is any grading, terracing, or drainage required? What are your irrigation requirements? Are there water restrictions, etc? If you are building a house, then you need the house grading and drainage done first before the vineyard. And if you think hillside vineyards look cool, think again, your price nearly triples if you need to terrace the land. Yikes!

 

4. Proposed vineyard layout, how many vines, rootstock, and varietal.

Prices for these line items above can vary widely. For us, each line item was $3-4K.

Gather all your reports and head to your local Agricultural Planning office. If all goes well after 3-6 mos., you’ll have your VESCO and 5 years to complete your project. But what about bullet #4 above, how do you find out all that information? You hire a vineyard manager!

What kind of vineyard do you want?

When you hire or contract with a vineyard developer/manager, they will ask what your goals are and help you design a vineyard to meet those requirements. But how do you decide what you want? Let’s start with size.

Size

Acreage, or how much area you want to plant, is not the only factor to consider when designing a new vineyard. How many vines per acre and how much total acres feed into your equation for how much you want to spend and thus, how many tons of grapes you will harvest in the future. Vineyards are usually described in acreage, but the amount of vines/acre can vary widely due to spacing. A 5-acre vineyard can produce as little as 5 tons, or up to 45 tons! This is all due to plant density and growing site. Of course, the more plants, the more cost for baby grapevines, but it also means more steel posts, more wires for the canes to grow on, etc.

Layout – how big, how dense?

Vineyard spacing is typically the ‘open’ space between each row followed by how far apart each vine is from each other. By ‘open’ space I mean where a tractor drives between the rows or where you walk to view that sunset with your glass of wine. Vine spacing is the distance between each grapevine in each row. When you hear “8x6” this means 8’ ft. wide rows with the plants 6’ ft. apart. The most common plantings you’ll see are 8x6, which translates to 908 vines/acre and 8x5,1089 vines/acre. This is considered medium wide planting and typical for wine grapes used in premium wines. In today’s expensive growing areas where land price is astronomical (such as Napa Valley) you can see vineyards as dense as 4’x3’. A 4x3 vineyard supports 3,620 vines per acre! Because the rows are so close, traditional tractors cannot be used further increasing your cost to farm. With 3X more vines/acre you would think, the more the better. But with plants that close, it requires a significant amount of watering, fertilizer/supplements, hedging and pruning (labor/tractor time) to keep canopy from becoming too dense. Even with the best farming practices, your fruit quality will suffer due to over-competition between the plants for sufficient nutrients. On the flip side with larger spacing, the plants don’t need to compete for nutrients as much (if at all), especially if planted on fertile soil, and less water is required to the point that you can employ ‘deficit watering’ or in the extreme, dry-farm (no irrigation) practices. In deficit watering, you only water the plants when absolutely needed to maintain target crop loads. This forces the vines to dig deep for water and tap into any shallow water tables. Paired with sustainable/regenerative farming practices such as cover crops on rows, minimal till/discing, cover grasses between vines, etc. you get the best of both worlds – good crop tonnage and high-quality fruit. The target crop load for premium wine is ~3 tons/ace. In 4x3 spacing their targets are closer to 8-9 tons/acre!

Once you have your final vineyard layout and all your documents in hand, you submit your VESCO. Typically, it takes 4-6 months to receive final signoff after any revisions and final review by the county agricultural planner. Congratulations, you are ready to plant. But plant what? That’s in next month’s blog.