Agriculture Forum: Keeping vines in line

BY DUKE ELSNER

Wine grapes require summer "canopy management" to maintain vine health and promote fruit development. Left on their own, vines will produce an excess of shoot growth, leaves and fruit clusters.

Reducing this excess starts in the winter when vines are pruned to bring them back into a desired shape and size. Once growth gets under way in the spring, there are typically still far more growing points in the vine than are actually needed. Right now, hundreds of vineyard workers are rushing to keep up with rapidly growing vines, accelerated by the recent high temperatures.

Leaving too many shoots to grow results in excessive numbers of fruit clusters for the vine to support and ripen -- which is very detrimental to fruit and wine quality. More shoots also mean more leaves; the canopy of the vines becomes dense, limiting light penetration and restricting air flow through the vine. These conditions favor fungal disease problems and slow fruit ripening.

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Dr. Duke Elsner is a viticulture and enology educator for Michigan State University's Extension Service.

Robert Young, pioneering Sonoma County grape grower, dies at 90

His focus on quality in growing wine grapes helped lead to one of California's first vineyard-designated wines.

By Claire Noland June 28, 2009

Photo: Robert Young, seeing money in growing grapes, moved away from producing prunes in the 1960s to grow wine grapes. He helped produce some of California's first vineyard-designated wines.

Robert Young, a pioneering Sonoma County farmer who changed his crop from prunes to grapes and helped produce some of the first vineyard-designated wines in California, has died. He was 90.

Young died June 19 at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital from complications of old age, said his daughter, Susan Sheehy.

A third-generation farmer from Geyserville in the Alexander Valley, he realized in the mid-1960s that he could make more money from wine grapes than from prunes, so he uprooted the trees and planted a vineyard, putting him at the leading edge of California's emerging wine industry. But it wasn't all about the profit.

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Chautauqua tops NY in grape production

Business First of Buffalo - by Thomas Hartley

Chautauqua County leads all New York state counties in grape-growing with 22,276 acres planted for grapes.

That figure, which is for 2007, is up 15 percent from 2002, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service reports.

The total acreage used for orchards and vineyards in the state, 99,658, was up 1 percent over the five years, but the number of fruit farm, 2,639, was down 2 percent.

Wayne County east of Rochester led all counties in apple acreage with 20,862. Apple acreage grew 7 percent from 2002, the USDA service reported.