The Pinot Noir was waking up on April 8 …
Bud Break
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Author Archives: Erroll
Not Just Grapes
Almost all commercial wine is made from grapes. There are good reasons to ferment grapes, but there is no good reason to ignore other fruit. I’ve sampled good commercial cherry wine, and while it’s not available locally, I know of some wineries that specialize in blueberry wine. I have made good, if I say so myself, wine from blueberries, raspberries, plums, apples, and rhubarb.
Since I’m particularly excited about making wine from what I grow in my own garden, I’ve started growing fruit trees in pots, just like my grape vines. A rhubarb patch yields enough “fruit” (most of us think of it as fruit even though it’s technically a vegetable) for rhubarb wine every year. But my bonsai orchard won’t produce fruit for years, and I’ll count myself lucky if my bonsai vineyard offers up enough grapes for a gallon of wine this year. So I’m going to make tomato wine this year!
It’s not as weird as it sounds. Though we all think of tomatoes as vegetables, they’re botanically fruit. Fruit of the vine, no less, and I can grow them from seed, harvest the fruit, and make wine in one season. The future members of my “tomato vineyard” have already sprouted, and I hope to transplant them outside in mid-May. I’ll keep you posted …
Suburban Vineyard
You can’t make great wine without great fruit, and top vineyards don’t, as a rule, hock their best grapes to home wine makers in 100 lb lots. I have bought grapes and made good wine from them, but I’ve always wanted to grow my own. With control over yield and harvest combined with endless fussing, I’ll be bottling a great vintage from my own grapes. That’s the plan, anyway. I had to overcome two big hurdles: wine grapes don’t grow in this climate (I live near Seattle, WA, USA). Even if they did, I don’t enough room, or good soil, in my backyard to grow them.
I can’t tell you how excited I was when I discovered that wine grapes do grow here! Cool climate varieties like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are being grown commercially in the Puget Sound area and local vineyards/wineries are making wine from locally grown, if more obscure grapes.
Even if the climate is suitable, grapes need a lot of room. They’re normally planted four to eight feet apart in rows that are up to ten feet apart. My 10,000 square foot lot isn’t small, as suburban lots go, but the house (and the patio and the driveway) takes up a good chunk of that. Plus there’s this hard pan about a foot down. Grapes hate that; they’ll put roots down six feet or more easily. I discovered the solution in the Africus Rex bonsai vineyard. Jeff Chorniak has been growing, and making wine from, Cabernet Franc grown in pots like bonsai trees. If he can do it in Toronto, Canada, then I can do it in Bellevue, WA!