Irrigated bines are overworked and spent after 7-10 years. Dry farmed vines last longer because they are not worked as hard. The OP is referencing Zinfandel it I remember correctly.
Here is one differing viewpoint, specific to Zinfandel. This is a piece of an article from 2000, when Paul Draper was honored with the Wine Spectator Distinguished Service Award.
“Draper knew that there were dozens of old-vine Zinfandel vineyards in California, some of the choicest having been planted between the 1880s and early 1900s. He also knew from his travels in Europe that old-vine grapes could provide greater depth and character than younger-vine grapes.”
http://www.winespectator.com/wssaccess/show/id/40921
Thanks,
Ed
Mondavi is owned by Constellation Brands, so… ![[soap.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/a/a7ea1fffd3ef237e8f19d17a83270ad8452218ca.gif "soap"){kind=small}
They also own Ravenswood, who make Old Vine Zin wines. So the point is…
Ed,
That’s called marketing. It sells wines, period. I’ve had this discussion with many winemakers and viticulturists over the years. What they say in private is different than what they say to the masses. In short age does not make a difference…with a big exception.
That big exception is the size of the parcel being farmed. The main problem with young vines is the vigor at which they grow. If you control that at various points along the year you can have a very young vine that makes outstanding world class wines. As Eric I. points out, there are plenty of examples of that over the decades. That however, is exceedingly (read that as being prohibitively) expensive to do unless the vineyard is very small. Even then your end cost for a bottle is still going to be very high due to the extra labor and tiny production.
As vines age they slow down, as everyone already knows, and it becomes far cheaper to actually farm those old slow producing vines as one doesn’t have to have a crew constantly going through the vines and dropping flowers or fruit. It essentially does it for you. In short, it simply comes down to less labor costs for old vines. Of course there is a tipping point where they slow too much and aren’t profitable anymore, but that’s another discussion.
So you can have fantastic wines with very young vines, you’re just going to pay a lot for it nowadays.
Would love to read these experiments. Do they account for depth of vine growth?
Jose Luis Perez, professor of viticulture and one of the founders of the Priorat movement, has vines with sensors all over them. He wondered about old vines as well.
The thing about woody plants is that they’re kind of weird. They’re a bunch of dead stuff covered by a live skin. And there’s no hierarchy like we have, where if your heart, lungs, or brain give out, you’re finished. Most of a plant can die, be eaten, or hit by lighting and as long as you have a few small roots, it will grow. All the business of growth each year is done by the young part of the plant - the roots and root hairs, etc. Once the root system is mature, there’s not a lot difference in sap flow, etc.
Most of the mass on any woody plant is in the top meter or two of the soil, so it’s not like deep roots give the plant all kinds of access to mysterious molecules deep in the earth. What matters more is root density, absorption ability, mass, etc.
When it comes to old vineyards, we should be careful about confusing correlation with cause. In theory, a woody plant can live forever, although they seldom do. There are gophers, viruses, fires, bugs, disease, etc. Some old vineyards survive because we haven’t pruned the plants back every year, destroying their carbohydrate stores. They may also have been planted on particularly good soil for those root systems, as mentioned, which helped them fight off adversaries.
It’s like old houses and old tools – there’s a connection to the people who first used them. So I like the idea of old vines, whether or not they make a difference.
The producers I’m talking about do not label their wines as ‘old vines,’ they just treat the older vineyards as different. There is no marketing if they’re not using it to sell product.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t some great wines made from fruit from younger vines, obviously. Some regions have made great improvements in eg clonal material since some of the older vineyards were planted, for one thing.
Where’s that banging head against a wall emoji?
Oliver, really? I’m sorry as im not trying to sound like a dick but if they are telling people in an interview, they are using it as marketing. Regardless if they put it on a label or their website or wherever. And exactly how does one treat an older vine differently? Every vine is a bit different than the others, regardless of age.
People forget, winemaking is first and foremost farming.
I am going to provide a list of a few articles that argue both sides of the discussion:
• Allen, Max. “Barossa Resilience: What Makes Old Vines Tick?”. Wine & Spirits, Feb 2007. 30-35.
• Comiskey, Patrick J. “Age Before Beauty: Do Old Vines Produce Better Wines?”. Wine & Spirits, Oct 2005. 46-55.
• Smith, Rod. “Raiders of the Lost Zin: Purple Treasures from the Russian River’s Centennial Vines”. Wine & Spirits, Oct 2004. 34-38.
• Sykora, Luke. “Zin Reincarnated: Can Young Vines Make Great Zin?”. Wine & Spirits, Feb 2015. 28-35.
I love the wines from many old vineyard sites, even with the knowledge that most have newer vines interspersed between the older ones. Keep in mind that most replantings use vine material from the older grapevines, perhaps suggesting that (as mentioned in Max Allen’s article) old vines aren’t good because they are old, but that they are old because they are good.
You should visit Will Bucklin who owns/farms Old Hill Ranch in Geln Ellen. The tap roots on his dry farmed old vines go 50’ and more deep and he root prunes between rows up to 3’ deep so most of the working root system is far below the surface. 26 varieties planted in 1883.
I don’t think this comes from a published interview. Germano is one of producers Oliver imports, so he speaks to Sergio, the owner.
As I said in an earlier post, from many visits to the region, Barolo and Barbaresco makers don’t talk much about old vines and I can’t think of any producer who refers to vine age on its label (that’s a dare to find one, which I’m sure someone will). So it is simply NOT a part of the marketing there.
So, as Oliver said, if they’re selling off the young vine wine cheaply as Langhe Nebbiolo instead of Barolo, it’s because they think there’s a quality difference, not so they can market the wine from mature vines as vigneti vecchi or whatever.
Challenge accepted.
John, just of of curiosity, how many 95-100 point scores did Squires give your wines during his visit?
Excellent! I forgot about the Paitin bottling, and I think I own a few bottles!
From a quick Google search, I see that Roagna, Corino, Morengo and A&G Fantino designate some of their bottlings as old vines, but that’s all I find in Barolo and Barbaresco.
I am by no means in expert in Bordeaux, especially with a good amount of age, but I do know that in 1956 Bordeaux suffered a great frost and killed off many vines. Just 5 years later 1961 is considered some of the greatest Bordeaux wines ever made. So were they made from only the old vines, or did some of the fruit from the newly planted grapevines make it into the blends? Always been curious…
I am travelling to Sonoma tomorrow for a few days so I look forward to trying some Old-Vine Zinfandel!
Well, I am glad you’re trying to not sound like a dick, Andy.
I’m talking about conversations with producers, not marketing materials or ‘interviews’.
No-one is forgetting farming, this whole discussion is about farming.
Brian – actually I want to go see him because I’m curious about how he does it and when. Sending you a PM. Root pruning that I’m familiar with is used for things like apples and it’s mostly done to reduce vegetative growth by reducing water and nutrient uptake. That reduces shoot growth, leaf size, leaf growth, etc. I imagine it would be the same for grapes. I know there are people in Australia and South Africa who have done it both experimentally and as part of their regular viticulture practice. As far as I know, it depends greatly on when you do it, as the effects are not permanent and show mostly in the first few weeks after the pruning.
The most obvious effect of reduced vegetative growth would be bonsai, but it’s also done to keep in-ground trees smaller than they’d otherwise be. And it doesn’t seem to affect the quality of the fruit – size, composition, etc.
There are a lot of dry-farmed vineyards in Spain. It’s generally extremely dry and the vines are widely spaced and not usually trellised, so they can provide their own shade to the soil around them. The roots have to go deep or the vines wouldn’t survive, especially since the people were often too poor to irrigate and there wasn’t available water anyway. Those are often old and even very old vines, sometimes pre-phylloxera. It’s not economic to do it unless you’ve owned the land for a long time though.
But the biomass allocation of the plant is the same – leaves, stems and roots, with roots being the driver of the other two. Leaves fix carbon and produce sugars, branches and stems provide support and a pathway for nutrients to flow, and roots absorb nutrients and water while anchoring the plant. And most nutrients are in the upper layer of soil. So while there can be deep roots, and some rootstocks are known to be more deeply or shallowly rooting, the fundamental nutrient needs of the plant are still going to come from the upper layers of the soil, as they just don’t exist too deeply, especially on hillsides. But yeah, I definitely want to see what Bucklin’s doing and how it compares to what I’ve seen elsewhere.
John, just out of curiosity, what are the ages of the vines at Silver Springs Winery or that you use for Don Giovanni?
If you are under the impression that vine age doesn’t matter, come by and taste some time. My older (30 to 115 year old) vineyards clearly produce superior wine. In the case of the Zinfandel, we make wines from vineyards aged 115, 32, 27, teens and single digit years. The quality almost linearly declines with vine age.
Peter Rosback
Sineann
Hi Jeff,
our vines are as old as 35 years old and as young as 15 … however this spring I am planting another vineyard small one … we own three properties …
Salute and Shalom !!!