All right, my friends. Now that we are somehow already half way through the month of March 2024, I thought it might be time before a little vineyard update. In case you’re unaware, we planted two vineyards in Sardinia in the beginning of 2023. Both encompass just over 2 hectares spread across a valley site and a mountain site near the village where my husband’s family is from in Sardinia. Though I never published a blog post covering our multi-day vineyard planting extravaganza with family and friends, you can read about some of the preparations leading up to planting here. We are also planning to launch a YouTube channel sharing our journey from vineyard to winery in Sardinia. For now, I wanted to share vineyard update on what we’ve been up to since we came back to Sardinia at the beginning this year.
Honestly, when we first arrived back and went to see the vineyard site in the valley, we were a bit devastated.
Some Backstory
Let me rewind a bit and explain for those who are unaware of the ridiculous amount of bureaucracy one must endure to live and work in Italy. Before we even began to prepare to plant, we were first required to apply for a quota of how many hectares or square meters of vineyards we were allowed to plant. Then, we had to share which varieties we were planting, and how much of each variety. This whole process began about four years ago. When we finally got the greenlight, we began all of our other preparations of ordering plants, preparing the terrain, etc.
Fast forward to last year ( four years later.), the vineyards have now been planted, and the controlling agricultural organization (which I will leave unnamed) arrives in late summer to check that everything has been planted to regulation so the vineyard can be certified for production if you will.
During this time, Marco and I were living and working in Napa Valley on the other side of the world. His uncle, who is not a winemaker or a viticulturist, was there with the people from the organization to walk through the vineyards and take account of everything.
His uncle called us after they left, and we were shocked to hear that they counted over 2000 dead vines in our valley site, which is about one third to half of the total valley site vineyard.
How could this be? Supposedly, his uncle had been going down to the valley site every day to irrigate, etc. and had never noticed that we had this many plants dead? They also counted about 500 or so vines in the mountain site that were dead. Albeit our technical representative, the agronomist that helps deal with all of the agricultural bureaucracy in Italy, was not present for any of these walk-throughs. Nevertheless, it’s been marked down and we are now on the line to replant all of these dead vines in order to have our vineyard certified for production. And all of that needs to be done basically by July 2024.
Currently in 2024
OK. So, we arrive in Sardinia mid January 2024 and head to the vineyards to check out the damage for ourselves. It turns out that around half of the valley site vineyard of did not make it through year one. Devastating blow indeed. Thousands of dollars spent, hours of work slaving away, and we lost a lot of plans.
We then come to find out from Marco‘s parents that basically the vineyard flooded. At least the half of the vineyard that died was under a serious amount of water. The valley site is the lowest of a series of plots below the village of Anela, which is basically nestled into the mountainside. When there’s a lot of rain, all of that rain runs down the mountain, over and through the various plots of land before reaching our vineyard site.
A couple of years ago when we were preparing the vineyard site to be planted, the stubborn men in Marco‘s family did not listen to us, per usual, and did not consider our idea of how we wanted to resolve the drainage issues for this site that were sure to arrive eventually because of how the land is graded. The solution that was implemented did not function properly, and the vineyard took on too much water. On top of that, following a serious deluge of water that was quite abnormal for Sardinia, we also had one of the hottest growing seasons as of late.
So, why am I telling you this?
People hear that we’re planting a vineyard or see us in action on social media, and they say, “how cool!“ or “how exciting!” And they’re not wrong. It really is both of those things. Very cool and very exciting.. However, planting the vineyard is very hard work. Maybe even more so in Italy where there’s a ton of red tape and bureaucracy to manage. And even more so still when you’re dealing with navigating family dynamics and stubborn old men who think they know better than you do.
Alright, that bit of a vent session is over.
What We’re Working On
We’re pressing on! No obstacles can keep our dreams at bay. Here is what we will be working on this month.
First and foremost, we’ve been working on clearing the wild green overgrowth of mostly native plants in between the vineyard rows and vines. Marco’s uncle kindly gave us his old tractor from the 1950s. She ain’t pretty, but she works! His dad has been having the time of his life using it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as happy as when he’s on top of that tractor, like a little boy playing with his toys.
However, we had some problems with la fresa - this attachment that trails behind the tractor to cut all of the grass and weeds. It was moving from side to side too much and difficult to control. It also made it difficult to turn the tractor into the next row without touching some of our trellising anchors in the ground. Anyways, we had to buy two metal pieces and have a local welder in the village making adjustments for us. But now that is done so we can get back to work! We spent a weekend manually hoeing around the vines and in between the vines of the valley site. It was most definitely exhausting, but had to be done in order to be able to access the plants for pruning, grafting, etc.
March arrived, and bud break kicked off in our mountain site with our white variety called Arvesiniadu. Those are the plants that have grown the most since last year. They are pretty much thriving except for a hundred or so that didn’t survive the year. We started seeing the cottony gems or buds starting to protrude and we hadn’t even begun pruning yet. So, Marco and his friend headed out to the mountain site in the first week of March to take care of the pruning. We haven’t been able to clear any of the natural overgrowth in between the rows of the vines yet. Consequently, the guys were basically swimming through waist high plants in order to prune our baby vines.
We’ve also been busy collecting canes from other vineyards of Cannonau and Arvesiniadu.
We sent some of the canes to the nursery for grafting onto phylloxera resistant rootstock to have them on hand next year as needed. The rest of the canes that will be used for grafting onto American rootstocks, which we planted in our vineyard last year.
Other big action items on the to-do list in March and April include putting in all of vineyard posts, setting up all of the vineyard trellising, mountain the irrigation onto the trellising, more pruning, and perhaps most importantly, fixing the drainage issues in the valley site once and for all. That’s going to involve putting in large drainage pipes that work with the slope of the land. We’ve already had a surveyor come and help us map out the plan of action. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for a week of no rain in order to make it happen. The vineyard posts should be arriving mid March and we already have all of the other anchors and trellising wires needed to get our vineyard set up.
Stay tuned for more vineyard updates! It’s meant to be an exciting adventure. Hopefully we’ll have launched our YouTube channel by the time I post the next vineyard update here on the blog so you can follow along on this journey.
1 comment
Nikki, interesting read.
Just when you think you’ve got everything under control, s**t happens.
Hang in there.