RCG-I Seasonal Salon Fall Equinox 2006

Wine Parable:Simplicity

Last spring we planted a hundred sticks. They stuck out of the ground about ten inches, brown and dry. They had rudimentary roots but basically, they were sticks. I did not believe, that hot spring day, that they would ever reach the lowest wire of the trellises we had built, some three feet off the ground, much less that they would reach the top wire, a foot or so over my head.

And some did not. Some died without putting out a single leaf. We were told to expect a “take rate” of about 50 percent; we did better than that, but every space between the vines feels like failure to me. When I plant a packet of carrot seeds, hundreds never sprout, but I can’t see them, so I don’t judge myself. But the vines are different. I have had to encounter my own perfectionism, giving myself over to growing a vineyard.

A few vines seem dwarfed, not yet up to the first rung of the trellis. We have to cut them back this fall, make them start again next spring. But for the others, the dozens of flourishing vines, we have a different task. We’ve been methodically pruning them, training a single trunk upwards. Left to their own devices, these vines would grow 100 feet long with just a few grapes at the end. For two years, our task is to work with the vines to create a stout trunk, from which we will later train cordons—fruit-bearing branches. We limit the leafy growth to encourage abundant fruit.

Limit leafy growth to encourage abundant fruit. It is not a lesson I find easy to learn, me of the congested computerized schedule. I have always been a wasteful gardener, overplanting and neglecting to thin. My life is too much like my garden, but my vineyard cannot be like either. The vines force me to learn lessons of simplicity. First, they are slow to root, so the vineyard has more space that I would have wished. And of the vines that have endured, we must cut back and cut back for several years.

It will be five or six years before we open the first bottle of wine from these vines. If we are not careful in these early years, they will be useless, rampant wild things that overwhelm the trellises and bear no fruit. But if we prune, and prune, and prune some more, we will help our vines towards long productive lives. And so each week we take the blade to green growth and hope for the future.