A trip to the Pepineriste

Or the grape-vine nursery, if you prefer.  We haven't yet ventured into the realm of replacing vines that have died over the last few years, a common occurence once your vineyards hit "a certain age."  Just when we thought we had learned just about everything, now there's this!  The last two years we felt we were doing well just by pruning, plowing, and spraying, but this year we have decided to give it a shot...

Thanks to our friend Bertrand Cortelli at Rouge Garance, we went to visit the nurseries of Lilian Berillon in a town called Jonquières just on the other side of the autoroute from Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Little did we know we were in for a great visit.  The man we met, let's call him Mr Lilian Berillon  (Iforgot to get his name- but it was clearly his business), was a wealth of information.  He is the kind of person that instills confidence immediately.  He explained everything to us in great detail and even took the time to drive us out to see the baby vines that are his life's passion.  He specializes in a grafting vines "à l'anglaise" or in the English way, which as he demonstrated to us, makes a much better graft then the classic omega.  It's pretty technical, so I'll save you the details, but his way of doing it is much more time consuming as it all has to be done by hand.  To give you an idea, we are going to be replacing vines in a parcel that is just about an acre. There are 250 vines to replace. Imagine re-planting a whole vineyard of let's say 5 hectares at about 4000 vines per hectare, that's 20,000 little plants that must each be grafted by hand! Yikes! This method is apparently much better for the future growth of the plant though. The graft takes over a wider surface area and the sap circulates better from the American root-stock through to the French varietal.

A little European viticultural history for you in case you don't already know:

In the late 1800s French plant enthusiasts started importing vines that were native to America and planting them in French gardens and vineyards.  Little did they know that the American vines carried a louse called Phylloxera that fed on the root-system of the European vines and killed them.  The bug spread quickly throughout Europe and devasted the winegrowing industry in France, Spain and Italy. Other countries were certainly affected, but I'm not sure to what extent.  France was the hardest hit, to the best of my knowledge. (If you're interested in reading more, there's a good book on the subject called Phylloxera by Christy Campbell- certainly available from you local bookstore.) They tried just about everything to save the vines until they figured out that the American vines were immune to the Phylloxera bug.  So, the solution was to graft French vines onto American root-stock, and thus the European wine industry was saved. Today most European vines are still grafted, though vine-growers are toying with some French-root vineyards, but only in small quantities.

(Here's the baby vines before they are pruned back and taken out of the ground. The roots are then trimmed and they're ready to plant!)

Back to our pepineriste... These days most vineyards are planted with clones that are all identified by numbers, but there are a few growers and nurseries that are working together to do "séléction massale".  Mr. Lilian-Berillon is one of these people. He is passionate about his work and he wants to start offering "séléction massale" plants to his clients.  It's a process in which you go to a vineyard with very old non-cloned vines and pick the strongest and best plants to take cuttings from.  The cuttings are then propagated into plants to sell to people like us who only have clones.  Lilian-Berillon is working with some of the oldest and most reputable wineries in southern France in hopes to have stock for 2008.  This year we will get cloned mourvèdre plants, since we truly need to get started replacing dead vines, but next year they will have "selection massale" grenache and syrah for us to plant!  Isn't it exciting?