Welcome to 2010!

Well, 2009 is history and now we wade through the tax season in preparation for a new growing year! I put over 2 tons of fruit from my dinky vineyard through the winery last Fall, only slightly less than in 2008 even with much heavier cluster thinning. Normal rainfall works miracles! The 2009 harvest is what I would consider "normal" with good, steady rains through July with plenty of good weather from August through November to allow harvest of my many varieties. Temperatures were moderate, overall, and while I did see a pretty good downy mildew load on secondary shoots, I had no fungal problems with the fruit and primary foliage. I let my new 2008 seedlings suffer the downy mildew in full and the 800-so remaining have proven their resistance from a pretty bad infection.

In addition to my normal Saturday sales at the Lynchburg, VA, Community Market during 2009, I participated in their Green Market Wednesdays from July through December. Folks seemed to be in better economic spritis toward the holidays than they had been most of the year. Hopefully the home financing debacle is winding down and everyone can get back to enjoying the good stuff at the market. It remains to be seen to what extent I will join in the Wednesday markets in 2010. With my ever increasing harvests of grapes, muscadines, apples, peaches, pears, plums, elderberries, blueberries, raspberries, vegetables, mulberries, figs, and now black currants to go in my apple wine; I am finding less and less time to spare during the week. Add the absurd paperwork load of running a farm winery and dealing with the Virginia Dept. of Taxation (which can't seem to make their website serve the taxpayers of this state, but rather incriminate them at every turn), and I am about as full up with the paper side of this business as I care to be.

Wines from Chateau Z Vineyard continue to be received well by buyers and there is good inventory of the main wines still to sell. I hope to join in the Thomas Jefferson Wine Festival this Fall at Poplar Forest, and possibly another festival or two, which will help keep the cellar from being overrun with bottled wine.

2009 saw first fruit on a large number of my 2005 and 2006 hybrid productions, and it was VERY exciting. Most of the newly fruting vines are Vitis aestivalis hybrids, and the fruit characteristics are spectacular considering this is a first generation from wild mother vines. The flavors are strongly dependant on the amount of Vitis labrusca in the pedigree of the hybrids, with those having high (25%) labrusca in their pedigree tasting much like the old line hybrid Eumelan which has a Welchy but spicy flavor. On the other end of the spectrum are unbelievably neutral red wine grapes from crosses of the aestivalis with the neutral French hybrids like Villard Blanc and Rayon d'Or. Wines from these grapes retains the aestivalis spicy character without any Welchiness. In between these end members, the flavors are very fruity but not what you would identify as a Welch's grape juice flavor. Most tend to a flavor approximating Norton with its difficult to describe fruitiness. Unlike Norton, however, almost all of my aestivalis hybrids are light red in color and need long hang time on the vine to reduce their acidity levels and gain what color they can. Here's and example of a cross of my High Peak Upper V. aestivalis X Vanessa (a seedless labruscana table grape):


and here is an example of a cross of my High Peak Upper V. aestivalis X Lakemont (a seedless labruscana table grape):

and here is an example of a cross of my High Peak Lowr V. aestivalis X Gewurztraminer:



In addition to the aesti-hybrids, I also saw fruit on my first cross to the Foxy Vixen, itself a wild hybrid of Vitis cordifolia X Vitis labrusca. This new grape is my 06-114-1 and was a cross of the Foxy Vixen with Elmer Swenson's Edelweiss. The new vine is very exciting because it is the closest analog I have found to the descriptions of the extinct Red Bland grape which was the mother of the Norton grape. This year I will cross the 06-114-1 with various aestivalis mothers and see if anything like Norton results. Given my experiences with my new aesti-hybrids, I don't expect the aestivalis X 06-114-1 seedlings to match Norton because the will likely lack the deep color of Norton. I do hope the fruit quality will be similar, however, giving us at least a glimpse of whether the 06-114-1 works like the Red Bland did as the mother of Norton. I also managed to make a LOT of seed on the Foxy Vixen with my two Chasselas selections (DVIT373 & DVIT689) which should be much more like the Red Bland than the 06-114-1. Still, the 06-114-1 gives a first good look at what the offspring from a large berry/cluster, white pollinator on the Foxy Vixen will look like. Here's the 06-114-1:


Some really fun fruit I saw for the first time in 2009 was from hybrids I made with the old line labruscana grape called Lindley bred by Edward Rogers in the 1850's. A couple of the seedlings of Lindley pollinated by Himrod made fruit and the third vine has the biggest berries of any tender labruscana in my vineyard. Columbian Imperial has bigger berries, but they are very tough skinned with rubbery pulp. The grape breeders on Lon Rombough's list server came up the the name "Miakota" (the power of the moon) for my new grape. It is pistillate like Lindley making it easy to hybridize on, and it has the most delicious fruit with delicately crunchy skins and pulp that melts in the mouth with only a couple seeds per berry. Another exciting cross turned out to be Rogers' Lindley X Rayon d'Or, AKA Albert Seibel's #4986. This group of seedlings ranged from green-white to gold to red with medium to large berries and flavors that are out of this world. The wines would be similar tothose from Romulus, Cayuga or Melody. I have named the #11 seedling Rayon d'Colorado (the ray of the color red) for its beautiful red fruit and the #2 seedling will be named after our friend Debbie Kasper, possibly using her maiden name. Here are these vines:

06-62-3 = Miakota:
06-66-11 = Rayon d'Colorado:
06-66-2 (tentatively = Debbie VanSchyndel):
Well, that's about enough for now. Stay tuned to www.chateau-z.com for the news hybrid seed list from 2009 and the 2009 Virtual Vineyard which I should be getting up soon after TAXES ARE DONE! In the mean time, think about this: