Viticulture at Acorn Hill Winery

If you were to open a winery and had an unlimited budget it might look like Acorn Hill. The cavernous winery building has lots of gleaming new stainless steel tanks and floor space to add many more. For public relations they use the same firm that helped work on direct shipment legislation in Richmond. And for winemaking and grape growing they have the French who of course have centuries of winemaking experience the relatively recent success of New World winemaking notwithstanding.

Franz Ventre is the winemaker at Acorn Hill. He is a noted fixture in Virginia having worked in the States for some years. The viticulturist, Benjamin Abric, is brand new to the USA having tended vines the year before at the Domaine de Marotte in Rhône just a few miles from the famed Chateaux Neuf du Pape appellation. Consequently Benjamin is well positioned to comment on the difference between growing grapes in Virginia and France having just finished off his first vintage here in the Old Dominion.

Benjamin tends 36 acres of vines in this Madison County vineyard. Young and handsome he speaks English, French, and Spanish albeit his English is sprinkled with some awkward wording so I have edited some of his quotes here to make them easier to read.

Chateaux Neuf du Pape red wine is made from a mixture of 13 grapes both red and white. Yet for the most part none of these grapes are planted in Virginia. But Rhône in general and Condrieu in particular is planted with viognier which is of course widely planted in Virginia.

Benjamin says that in Rhône viognier is harvested earlier than in Virginia because the winemakers there want to have a wine with high acidity and they also want to avoid the rains of fall. Benjamin says, “[the] flavor and aroma of viognier changes very fast with brix.”

In Rhône they have less rain than in Virginia (7 inches during the growing season he says). Last year he sprayed fungicides 4 times while in Virginia he sprayed 9 times because of the rain and the humidity. He says that in France it is possible to go 25 days between sprays while characterizing that as “impossible here”.

In the ancient vineyards of Rhône they us the thoroughly modern VSP (vertical shoot positioning) trellis system 70% of the time. He says the French lyre system is mainly for table grapes. The remaining vines are head trained meaning they stand up by themselves with no trellis at all.

On this fall day the vineyard has just harvested malbec but Benjamin explains that the merlot needs to hang a couple of more weeks. He says you need to wait until the seeds are brown, brittle, and taste nutty in order for the fruit to be truly ripe. He says the grapes should be starting to lose their perfect symmetrical shape as they start to raisin slightly.

He explains, “When you sample some berries you have to do three jobs at the same time. First, the flavors. Second, the skins. Third the seeds. This is very important for the maceration in the tank. For example here you have some strawberry, some really fruity flavors like blackberries and things like that. Because in the grapes in the skins you’ve got natural flavors that we call in French ‘le catin’. And that comes out when it is really ripe.”

Benjamin comments on the soils here at Acorn hill. Like lots of Virginia soils these are naturally high in potassium, too high in fact to allow the uptake of magnesium and boron so he feed that to the vines with foliar fertilizers. He says these soils are rich unlike the rocky thin soils found in Rhône, so they planted the vine close together to curtail their vigor. He says the French soils are naturally at the optimal PH of from 6.5 to 7 while in Virginia soils are acidic in part because of fertilizers used to grow forage for cattle.

He says, “We have deep and rich soils. What we want to do by close spacing is to have natural competition between the vines. [This way] they are going to have less vigor. We are in a block of merlot with close spacing. There are about 5,000 vines per hectare.” The spacing is 7 feet by 3 feet.

One thing you notice is that there is less leaf pulling here in this vineyard that others you might see in Virginia. I have joked with friends that they must be paying their migrant workers by the hour because their vines have been plucked free of leaves on both the hot side (the west side) and the east side at least one foot above the cordon. Benjamin says he pulls leaves to let in air and sunshine but not excessively. He says, “You want to do leaf pulling to let the air and the sun penetrate the grapes. There is no reason to do more than that.”

Most vineyards prefer the area underneath the canopy to be bare dirt so that the grapes do not have to compete with weeds and grass for water and nutrients. But to keep out weeds and grass requires either lots of herbicides, many days of back breaking labor with the hoe, or a propane torch to burn the weeds away. Benjamin uses cultivation instead.

Benjamin uses a machine called “LUV Perfekt" which is manufactured by Braun in Burrweiler, Germany. This machine is attached to a tractor where it slices off grass and weeds by the roots thus eliminating the weeds mechanically. Benjamin says this has the added advantage of cutting off the shallow roots of the grape vines to make the vines grow roots deeper which he says can penetrate even hardpan soils. In Rhône he has seen roots on 100 year old vines go as deep as 50 meters in the rocky soils there while he read in a magazine there that in one vineyard roots were found as deep as 90 meters.

Here he makes a statement I had never heard before connecting deep roots to the concept of terroir. He says, “Actually we want to cut a little bit of root. If we cut the surface roots it encourages the roots to go deeper where they would find more minerals. They will be less sensitive to dry weather. Finally they are going to reach what we call in France ‘le terroir’. It depends on the nature of your soil if it is deep or not or poor or rich. When you cut the roots of the plant the plants want to be alive.”

Sounding like the noted soil scientists Gary Zimmer or Graeme Sait he says, “If I could work without herbicides that would be perfect for me because that is bad for the biological life of the soil. [In France they have shown that] not using herbicides increases the quality of the wines because it increases the quality of the grapes. The plant is alive so when you have some bad thing in the soil they are going to pick it up. We want biological life in the soil. That is really good to have biological life in soil.”

(This article appeared in the Spring 2008 edition of The Virginia Wine Gazette.)