2. Developing Your Skills and Knowledge

2.1 Learning about Wine

As we look at ways you can develop your skills, you should start thinking about what your focus will be as you prepare yourself for a career as a winery or vineyard owner. Take some time to identify your primary goals and interests before you begin looking for resources to further your skills and knowledge. Perhaps you’d like to produce a high quality marketable Chardonnay, or maybe you want to create a vineyard and nursery to supply other wineries with cold climate grapes and vines. By identifying and stating your goals beforehand, you will be able to better determine which resources will help you develop the skills you will need in your particular industry niche and you will have a better idea of what to look for.

Are you planning to become a vineyard owner? Then you should choose resources that will increase your knowledge of viniculture and agricultural issues, and give you some grounding in botanical knowledge and crop pest management. Are you planning to become a winery owner? Then perhaps you might want to include some business and marketing courses or seminars in your resources list, since these will be invaluable in helping you to run your business and market your product.

The ultimate goal for a winery owner is to produce a wine of excellent quality that you will be proud of, and that consumers will be delighted to purchase for their tables. To help you start thinking about what your focus will be, read the following brief introduction to the vine, the grape and the wine.

2.1.1 Viticulture

Wine, of course, starts out as simple grape juice. Grape juice comes from crushed grapes. Grapes grow on grape vines. And that’s where it all starts: the vine. While this all may seem rather elementary, without that single foundation, a grape vine suited to the climate you’ve introduced it into and able to thrive in that environment, no vineyard owner will ever produce a grape suitable for winemaking and no winery owner will ever produce a wine of marketable quality from those grapes.

Grape vines that produce commercial grade wine grapes come mainly from a single species:vitis vinifera. This is the scientific name given to the domesticated grape species originally native to Asia Minor but which has been cultivated for many thousands of years primarily in the northern hemisphere. In recent centuries, largely due to European colonization in the Americas, another species,vitis riparia, a species native to North America, has become closely intertwined with the originalv. vinifera species because it has been used to create more insect-resistant hybrid varieties and varieties that are better able to withstand colder climate areas of North America.

As a result of this careful vine husbandry, wine grapes are now grown in areas like the northern U.S. and southern Canada where previously cultivating wine grape vines was very difficult if not impossible. In fact, a large number of specialty nurseries have emerged in the past few decades to serve the growing market for grape vines all across North America.

If you are building your vineyard from scratch your most likely source for vines will be a nursery specializing in grape vines for the domestic market such as those you will find in the nursery and grapevine sources in the websites listed below. These nurseries can provide you with a wealth of information about different types of vines that do best in certain climates and in particular growing conditions. Before you plant your vineyard, be sure to consult with your source nursery about the type of vines that grow best in your area.

For a quick sample of domestic vineyard-nurseries, you can read about how grape vines are grafted onto hardy root stocks at the Tablas Creek Nursery and Vineyard website. You can find a list of nurseries in the U.S. and Canada that specialize in grape vines at the websites listed below.

• Tablas Creek Vineyard Nursery Cycle

http://bit.ly/9IPq1T

• Nursery List

http://bit.ly/aQeDdJ

• Grapevine Sources

http://bit.ly/bq82Cu

Many vineyards in North America have started on existing farmland that previously grew other fruit crops like apples, pears, berries, and so on. Savage Oakes Vineyard and Winery in Maine, for example, started out as a blueberry farm. With a limited market for blueberries, the owners began to explore the possibility of producing a blueberry wine from the existing blueberry crop and progressed naturally from there to the possibility of planting grape vines. Their first experimental two-acre vineyard has doubled to four acres, and they have now experienced several successful years as a small-scale commercial wine producer.

If you already own a farm (or know of farmland available for sale in your area) and you’re in an area where wine grapes are grown, chances are it can be adapted to vineyard planting practices. Considerations for planting your vineyard include soil conditions, amount of precipitation, temperatures, crop pests likephylloxera and nematodes, and a host of other important issues. (Many of these issues will be explored in greater detail in Chapter 5.) However, one of the most important factors that will be critical to your success among these other more general considerations, is the grape variety or varieties that will grow best in the climatic conditions you experience locally.

Viticulture Areas

A geographic area that is well known for being a good wine grape producing region because of certain soil and climate conditions, elevation or other physical features, is known as a “viticulture area” or VA (DVA for “Designated Viticulture Area” is often used in Canada). To be officially designated as a VA, a viticulture area must be formally recognized through a lengthy application process with government authorities regulating the wine industry. The term “viticulture area” should not be confused with a wine’s appellation, which can refer to many other factors besides the geographic region where the wine was produced.

Some of the largest viticulture areas in the U.S. and Canada with the number of resident wineries in each:

United States

Canada