From the Atlanta Journal Constitution

By GIL KULERS
For the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/14/07

Where tobacco once ruled, a new crop is pushing up through the rolling hills of western North Carolina.

With the burgeoning Yadkin Valley wine region growing around it, Surry Community College in Dobson has become the epicenter for information on grape growing and winemaking on the Eastern seaboard.

In just seven years, the modest winemaking facility, situated in a garage, and 40 acres of vineyards have become a crucible for developing home-grown talent for North Carolina, the country’s ninth-largest wine-producing state.

“We didn’t know what the climate was going to be like for grapes,” said Van Coe, owner of Stony Knoll Vineyard, which opened in 2003. “[At the college], you get a lot of exposure to different grapes and find out what works in different types of conditions. Surry laid the groundwork for us. They were the brain trust for our winemaking enterprises.”

Winemaking in North Carolina awoke in the early 1970s after its long slumber following Prohibition, but things really didn’t get moving until the late 1990s. The Shelton brothers, Ed and Charlie, developed the ambitious Shelton Vineyards project (a 25,000-square-foot winery with 250 acres of vineyards) in Dobson, N.C., in 1999, and they wisely hired Sean McRitchie from Oregon’s Benton-Lane Winery.

McRitchie’s father, the renowned viticulturist and winery consultant Robert McRitchie, followed his son to North Carolina. The elder McRitchie jump-started the Viticulture and Enology Department in 2000 at Surry. Soon after, the school had a half-dozen 263-gallon stainless steel tanks, two 526-gallon tanks and a professional winemaking laboratory. McRitchie also started studies on rootstocks and the region’s weather and soil conditions, in addition to teaching local aspiring winemakers how to grow grapes and make wine.

McRitchie provided the enviable intellectual foundation for Surry’s wine program, but people like former tobacco farmer Tommy “Vance” Marion provided the undeniable need … and the core reason why Carolina wines and Surry have been so successful so quickly.

Marion was a lifelong tobacco farmer before coming to Surry in 2001 as the school’s vineyard manager. When the tobacco, textiles and furniture industries hit the skids, North Carolinians saw that the wine industry — which before Prohibition had a history just as rich as California’s — had the potential to fill the vacuum.

Standing in his immaculate, orderly equipment barn, Marion gives the appearance of the luckiest man in the world. Asked if he gets nostalgic for what was for so long King Tobacco, he quietly but emphatically says: “I don’t miss tobacco, not one bit.”

Coe, whose family for more than 100 years has owned the property on which Stony Knoll sits, echoes Marion’s sentiments. “Tobacco is dirty, hard and dangerous. Grape growing is just hard.”

In the real world, a winery not only must make wine but must sell it, too. Surry established its own bonded winery for students to learn the hard lessons of bringing their product to market. One of only a handful of student-run wineries in the country, and the only one in the East, Surry Cellars wines can be found in several locations in North Carolina, including Charlotte’s Douglas International Airport.

In addition to its own marketing classes — a part of its two two-year degree programs — Surry has entered discussions with Appalachian State to create a four-year degree program with more emphasis on the business side of the wine industry.

With the wheels spinning so fast with Surry’s wine program, the school’s president, G. Frank Sells, felt the need to take action before those wheels fell off. Two years ago, he proposed to the college’s board that through public-private effort, Surry would build the North Carolina Center for Viticulture and Enology on Surry’s campus. The $15 million, 45,000-square-foot building would house a winery, a barrel storage room, classrooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium. It would also solidify the region’s status as the center for winemaking research and information on this side of the country, leapfrogging over more venerable regions like Virginia and New York.

Sells passed the collection plate around to area wineries and related businesses, which ponied up $3.5 million. In 2006, the state came through with $1 million for feasibility studies, building design and planning. This year, the state promised an additional $6.5 million.

“The Legislature has been absolutely visionary on this matter,” Sells said in April, when it seemed likely the money would be approved. “They have been bold enough to say that this state used to be the No. 1 grape grower in the country and there’s no reason why it can’t be that way again.”

Then the effort to get the winery out of the garage hit a bump in the road. The $6.5 million was cut down to $1 million in the House version of the budget bill and a mere $500,000 in the Senate’s version.

“That’s not nearly what we wanted,” said a still-positive Sells in June. “My recommendation to the board will be that if we get $500,000 or $1 million, we’re looking at $4 [million] to $4.5 million when you add in the local commitments we have. We’d still have enough for a new winery. … It would be a better facility than we have our winery in now, but we can’t sit back and wait and lobby for all the money each year.”

Sells expects to hear something by the beginning of July. Until then, Surry will continue to turn out winemakers who understand the ins and outs of growing grapes and making wine on Tobacco Road.

Gil Kulers, a certified wine educator with the Society of Wine Educators, is beverages instructor for the culinary arts program at Chattahoochee Technical College.

I took two weeks off from the vineyard and went to visit with my parents and inlaws in Holland, Michigan. I put down a spray on the day before I left of Sulfur and Dithane (mancozeb) and prayed for very little rain until the day I came back. Lo and behold, no rain was registered until the day before we returned home when the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry dropped a couple of much needed on the vineyard.

The grapes are now pretty much post bloom. Although there are some clusters still in the later stages of bloom. I didn’t put any Sulfur down as the temps are in the 90s and I didn’t want to burn the plants. As you can see from the picture below, the plants are really healthy at this point. The Cabernet Sauvignon especially has a very even canopy and has been trained well through the extra VSP wires, so the canopy is pretty open, the shoots are of relatively uniform length and overall fruitset appears to be pretty good.

Here’s a couple of pics from today:

Additionally, a huge old oak tree fell over while I was gone crushing a portion of my deer fence and taking down a little bit of trellising. That has taken me a couple of days to clean up. I still have to repair the fencing and the trellising, that is on my agenda for tomorrow. Otherwise, I’ve been suckering and doing some weeding. Saw my first Japanese beetles today! Hooray!

I’m not positive yet, but I think my vineyard continues to suffer from poor fruit set. I need to have a consultant come down and take a look. I found the article below to be interesting, and it may describe why fruit set seems to give me so much trouble. My vines are just too vigorous at fruit set I think.

Avoiding Poor Fruit Set
Harsh late-spring weather in 2005 may have put a damper on this season’s crop but don’t give up on getting berries on those clusters.
By Mark Greenspan
From Wine Business Monthly, 03/15/2006

No one in the North Coast of California needs to be reminded about the late spring rains that made life difficult for winegrowers in 2005. For most, it interfered with powdery mildew control and led to other disease problems. For some Pinot Noir growers on the coast it meant no crop, resulting from a nearly absolute lack of fruit set. For the remainder of North Coast growers, the fruit set was normal to heavy.

The scuttlebutt is that next year’s crop might be light due to poor bud fruitfulness, resulting from the nasty late spring weather. That concern has merit. Rainfall itself does not hamper bud fruitfulness, but temperature and carbohydrate availability do. The rainy and cloudy conditions led to low temperatures and low sunlight conditions from mid-April through mid-May in the North Coast. This period coincided with bud differentiation, at least for the basal buds, and may very well have created fewer and/or smaller clusters for the 2006 season. By now, pruning has been completed, and there’s not much that can be done to increase the crop level. But there is still some time to think about fruit set.

In the same way that weather hampers bud primordial differentiation, the wrong weather conditions can hamper fruit set in a vineyard. Poor berry set (coulure) occurs when assimilates (carbohydrates) are in short supply at the time of pollination and fertilization. Another condition called “hens and chicks” (millerandage) occurs when temperatures are low during this period, and pollen tube growth and ovule development are impaired, leading to small, seedless berries (“chicks”) in the same bunch as seeded berries (“hens”).

Being at the mercy of the weather is just part of the package of being a farmer. Complaining about the weather is easy. But to be aware of controllable factors and acting accordingly is the mark of an astute winegrower and viticulturist.

If carbohydrate availability is one of the keys to setting fruit, then the level of assimilates in the cluster (inflorescence) is of paramount importance at fruit set, especially if the weather is gray. Rampant shoot growth, resulting from excessive water and/or nitrogen availability, will channel much of the vine’s assimilate to the actively growing shoot tip rather than to the inflorescence. That is likely the reason why high nitrogen levels are commonly blamed for “blown bloom” while there is conflicting evidence as to whether high nitrate levels really do have a negative effect on fruit set. Nevertheless, heavy nitrogen fertilization is bad viticulture as we do not want large, bushy canopies anyway. There is no reason why shoots should be growing vigorously at the time of bloom and fruit set—unless the rainy season persists into May and June.

In Northern California, there is rarely, if ever, any need to irrigate before bloom and fruit set stages. Generally, there is sufficient soil moisture stored from the rainy season to eliminate any need for irrigation well past this time. On the other hand, growers in the arid Central Valley and Central Coast may find some years where the vines get water-stressed by bloom. In this case, some irrigation is necessary as water-stressed vines will not set fruit.

According to Dr. Peter May, who literally wrote the book on this subject1, the most practical method for improving fruit set is shoot tipping: removing a few inches from the shoot tip. This will temporarily divert assimilates away from the tip and allow more to be available to the inflorescence. However, timing is critical. It must be performed right at the time of cap-fall. Too late and the intended effect will not be achieved; too early and the shoots will resume growth before fruit set has completed.

Micronutrient defhen two weeks before bloom is? Offhand, I’d say that one would have to take an educated guess, though degree day models may be useful for that purpose.

Steve Matthiasson, president of Premiere Viticulture in Napa, recently spoke to me about his experiences using molybdenum in many of the Merlot and Chardonnay vineyards he oversees. He has applied Mo at a similar rate described above prior to bloom. For vineyards whose petioles indicated deficient levels of Mo, fruit set was visibly improved. But in the few vineyards whose petioles had sufficient levels of Mo, fruit set was not affected. These were just observations, not experiments, but Matthiasson seems convinced that the roughly $12 he spent per acre was well worth the cost.

Why does Mo help fruit set? Longbottom et al.2 found that while many details are still unclear, pollen tube growth, ovule penetration and fertilization were increased when supplemental molybdenum was applied, but only if the vines were deficient in the first place. Molybdenum is known to be a cofactor for some enzymes, including nitrate reductase3. It is also involved in synthesis of some plant hormones, specifically indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) and abscisic acid (ABA).

Which, if any, of these biochemical processes or products promotes fruit set is currently uncertain. But from a practical standpoint it seems like a no-brainer that, if fruit set has been a persistent problem, a $12-per-acre shot of moly is worth a try. The real question is: Does the world really need more Merlot? wbm