Cultivating Life: A Call For A Diversity of Viticultures

This was one of the better clusters…

It looks like we’ll be harvesting only the wisdom of hard lessons this vintage. Our Crenshaw Cru front yard grapes have been almost entirely destroyed by powdery mildew.

The grapes were about 75% through veraison when Hurricane Hilary hit, dumping over 5 inches of rain in about 12 hours. I started picking through the grape clusters two days later to assess whether I should do another final spray of Cinnerate, the fungicidal spray I use last in the growing season. As I inspected the grapes, I began to feel sick. It was already too late. Nearly every cluster was so infected with powdery mildew as to be unusable for wine.

But this late season rain, and our changing climate, is not why my grapes were destroyed. It was just the final straw. The reasons behind the complete failure of this vintage are complex and deserve both a macro and a micro examination.

First, the powdery mildew life cycle actually begins in the early spring. Early season controls are essential to prevent late season issues. The winter and spring of 2022-23 is in the top eight wettest seasons on record for Los Angeles. In addition to this, we had foggy, misty, gloomy weather well into June, with some unusual, for LA, late spring rains to boot.

All of this created conditions both ideal for powdery mildew spore germination, and difficult for anyone trying to farm organically. Even with regular sprays of organic mildew suppressants, like oils and sulfur, the continually wet and humid conditions would have required extremely heavy application with much more frequency than normal. Normal spray intervals for organics are 10-14 days depending on conditions, which I followed all season (14 or more sprays this year). But I know one organic farmer in Santa Cruz, who had the same kind of winter and spring, who sprayed every 7 days and still found a significant percentage of his crop is now covered in powdery mildew.

The extra rain and moisture in the air also resulted in very moist soils. These moist soils caused increased vegetative growth in the vines. Basically the vines grew like crazy this year. The problem with all this growth is that it creates more shady spaces of still, moist air that are the perfect microclimates for mildew growth. I hedged and leafed and thinned my vines prior to every spray, so every 10 to 14 days, yet this wasn’t enough. The canopy would regrow and become an impenetrable pool of shade within a couple days.

These are the conditions that would apply generally to many people growing grapes in California this year. But I also have some specific conditions on top of this that exacerbate all of these problems.

The Crenshaw Cru soil is actually too rich. It is heavy clay, which holds enormous amounts of water, and I’ve been amending it for 11 years with organic matter and composts and regenerative, no-till farming. So it is a three-feet-deep incredibly fertile and microbially active sponge, which, of course, adds to the vigor and vegetative growth of the vines, which adds to the problems of a shady, moist microclimate.

Also, I planted the vines in the front yard in a one-meter by one-meter spacing because I wanted to maximize my small urban space. With the richness of the soil, this is just too close. I have 15 vines in space where I should probably have 5. All that excessive growth becomes an even bigger problem when it happens in close quarters and creates crowded, over-lapping growth.

In other words, if I was going to design a powdery mildew paradise, it would look something like the front yard vineyard of Crenshaw Cru.

Yet if I just focused on all of these complex and inter-related issues about a specific vineyard site and its soil and layout and changing climate and the life cycle of fungi, I might miss the bigger, more important causes of my total crop failure this year.

Farming is a dynamic enterprise. I talked to someone who had been farming his whole life, and he said, “I don’t have 40 years of cumulative farming experience. I have 40 completely different experiences – one for every year I’ve been farming.”

I adjusted to the extremely wet conditions this year. I had to hedge and leaf and trim much more than in other years. But it wasn’t enough. I farmed from a formula that worked in the past for me, rather than observing and listening – paying attention to the vines – and reacting to their changing needs. I should have hedged much more aggressively and more often. I should have shortened the spray intervals. Perhaps, now that the vines are maturing, I should have removed five of them to create more space for the remaining ones.

If we stop the analysis here, though, we would easily end up with the agricultural system we currently have. Because the next step, if you’re unwilling to look deeper, is to conclude that what we need are stronger sprays. If organics are so weak that you get mildew even with regular application, it must be time to bring out the big, chemical guns. Bad fungus this vintage? We have a fungicide that’s even worse! This is how we grow wine, for the most part, around the planet.

But the real issue isn’t with the ineffectiveness of organic treatments, or that I didn’t do enough, or that we had weird weather. The real problem is that I put what I wanted where I wanted it, instead of asking if what I wanted was what’s right for my land.

If I step out of my vines, I don’t find mildew or fungal issues anywhere else at Crenshaw Cru. The prickly pear cactus that’s six feet from the vines in the front yard, just across the sidewalk, is better than fine, with several plump fruits ripening beautifully. The lemon tree that some of the front yard vines grow into is perfect, with glossy, happy green leaves and another bumper crop of fruit forming. The avocado, pomegranate, and mango trees just a few feet from the vines are full, abundant, healthy, and mildew free. AND I didn’t have to spray any of them with anything. In fact, the main work I’ve had to do for these other plants has been thinning their bumper crops to prevent their branches from breaking under the weight of the fruit.

I will definitely take away some hard lessons from this vintage about viticulture, vineyard establishment, canopy management, spray regimens, matching all of this to soil and micro-climate, and the need to observe and adapt to changing conditions. But there’s a much more profound lesson that I’ve learned. You need to grow the right plant in the right place, and vitis vinifera is not the right plant for my place.

Why, when there are examples of other plants growing just fine all around vinifera, do we not think it strange to have to spray vinifera 14 or more times in a growing season in order to keep it healthy enough to harvest grapes? Why do we persist in growing vinifera even when we do those 14+ sprays, and almost the same number of days of canopy management, and then lose the entire crop to mildew? Why do we give vinifera a pass?

The main reason we do this is because we’ve believed a lie that is the basis of our entire wine industry. That lie is that there are only a few varieties of grapes – “noble varieties” – from which it is possible to make good wine, and all of those noble varieties are of the genetically superior vitis vinifera species.

This lie forms the foundation of every level of the wine industry, and is the cause of the global monoculture of a handful of the same grapes grown everywhere around the planet wherever it is possible to grow grapes, even if those places aren’t really the right place to grow those grapes. Given the horrific track record of all other theories (lies) of genetic superiority, why haven’t we questioned this one at the center of the wine industry?

Does no one else think it strange that all the wine we drink, whether in California, or Oregon, or New York, or Texas, or New Zealand is actually all the same wine made with French grapes? Does no one else  want to drink South African wine when you go to South Africa, rather than French wine made in South Africa?

As an aside, I use the term “wine industry” intentionally. I want to build a wine culture. A culture is something that grows locally from native or locally adapted flora and fauna. It can’t be commoditized and franchised around the globe, because it grows out of a specific place. A culture is like a local fingerprint, unique everywhere you go.

Bringing this back to Crenshaw Cru, and grapes, I think there’s one other confession that I need to make… one other part of this failure that I need to own.

Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot about hybrid grapevines. I’ve met with and interviewed multiple grapevine breeders. I follow a grapebreeders group that includes some giants – scientists who have dedicated their lives to grape genetics, and who are responsible for pretty much all the new varieties of wine grapes that have been developed in the last 40 years. I’ve also begun to drink a lot of wines made from hybrid grapes.

What is a “hybrid?” A hybrid is a genetic cross of different species of grapes. For example, Baco Noir is a hybrid because it is an inter-species cross of vitis riparia and vitis vinifera. Cabernet Sauvignon is a “cross” rather than a hybrid because it was made from the combination of two grapes of the same species of vitis vinifera (Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc). Here in the US a hybrid usually refers to grapes developed by crossing a native American grape with vitis vinifera. Modern hybrid grapes are often multi-species, multi-variety crosses with big family trees . Hybridization is a common strategy in all fruit production, and many of our favorite fruits currently, in terms of popularity, are hybrids.

Hybridizing is merely rolling the genetic dice to try to get children who contain the best of both parents. Sometimes you roll snake eyes, and sometimes you roll sevens. When a hybridization results in a vine that has multiple desirable factors like cold-hardiness, fungal resistance, and delicious grapes, you’ve hit the genetic jackpot and can select that grape for clonal propagation.

I should mention that hybridizing fruit, grapes or otherwise, has no inherently negative or positive effect on the resulting progeny. But if you have a belief in the genetic superiority of one species, hybridizing becomes a bad thing that creates “impurity” and a “dilution of the gene pool” and “weakening of the species” etc. I probably don’t have to remind you that this kind of belief is associated with some of the worst parts of human history.

I’ve fallen in love with hybrids. I’ve tasted many delicious wines – yes many – made from hybrids. And not just delicious: sublime, exceptional, stunning wines… wines that need no caveats nor apology, and that can be judged against any other wine in the world and found as delicious, if not more so.

In other words, I’ve discovered that the lie that forms the basis of the wine industry is exactly that: a lie. The truth is that there are not only many varieties of grapes that can make good wine… there are many species of grapes that can make great wine. Not to mentions that wine doesn’t have to be limited to just grapes either!

As I’ve fallen in love with hybrids, I’ve fallen out of love with vinifera. And as my feelings for vinifera have diminished, I think I didn’t give these vines at Crenshaw Cru the attention they needed. That’s on me. But it’s on them for being so damn needy!

Could I have grown my vinifera grapes successfully this year? Yes, I think I possibly could have. But it would have taken twice the amount of time and resources than the significant amount I already spent. On the other hand, all the time I spent spraying and tending my vinifera this year, for naught, is time that I wouldn’t have had to spend if I was growing something like Petite Pearl or Baco Noir (two hybrids that can make incredible wine).

In fact, I know someone who farms Baco Noir in the Sonoma Coast AVA – a region that got even more rain than LA did this winter and spring, and known for moist maritime climate – and they don’t spray it at all. Zero fungicide of any kind. The fruit is pristine this year, while a few vines of vinifera that were inter-planted amongst the Baco Noir are completely destroyed by powdery mildew – a true side-by-side comparison.

(Do yourself a favor and get a bottle of Matt Niess’s 2022 Rebel - Baco Noir - under his North American Press label, when he releases it. In fact, buy a case… you’ll thank me. If you have lingering prejudices about hybrid grapes, due to growing up with the lie that undergirds the dominant approach to wine, the 2022 Rebel will change your mind.)

So on top of hybrids making great wine, they could save me a significant amount of time and money, and actually produce a bountiful crop in a wet year (for LA). If you took the time and expense that I spent trying to control fungus in Crenshaw Cru this year and multiplied it by 100  – to get to a commercial size vineyard – think of the potential savings!

These are practical and very important considerations. But there’s also the psychological component. With vinifera I can shower them with care but still have to worry whether I will have usable fruit at harvest. There’s a baseline of stress to this kind of viticulture. I could relieve that stress with hybrids while at the same time removing the extra work and expense.

Even more profoundly, growing vinifera – either organically or otherwise – means that I’ll be required to use outside inputs: fungicides of some kind. Where do those come from? How are they produced? How much fossil fuel gets burned to produce and ship them to me? What kinds of businesses and systems am I supporting when I buy them? What are these systems doing to our world and how long can they continue? With hybrids, these questions, and their at times unsavory answers, can be reduced and even, in a Mediterranean climate, eliminated.

Ultimately, though, the greatest psychological shift that hybrids allow for may be the elimination of the need to constantly think defensively. With vinifera I spend a lot of time and psychic energy thinking: how do I prevent, exclude, or kill the fungi or other pests that want to suck the life out of my grapes? When you relate to life from a defensive posture, it inhibits creativity, represses freedom of expression, and stifles joy. This aspect is hard to quantify of course, but could lead to things like thinking about how to build beauty into my vineyard, and having the time to actually implement the ideas that I come up with.

Does vinifera make delicious wine? It absolutely can. But just as there’s much more to a meaningful and joyful relationship than whether your partner is good-looking, I have higher expectations than just good flavor in the crops upon which we build our wine culture.

Think about this: the genetics of one species of grape from Europe and West Asia, tinkered with by humans for 8,000 years or more, resulted in thousands of varieties of winegrapes, a handful of which are the basis of the delicious wine that most of us know and love. That’s one species. In America we have at least 24 species. There are approximately 60 species of grapes around the planet. Think of the genetic potential, especially if we start crossing them. Actually you don’t have to imagine, we’ve already started crossing them and the results are phenomenal. And we’ve only been at it for a relatively short time. (And that’s just grapes.)

I hope it’s clear that I’m not anti-vinifera. Vinifera genetics should be part of the mix of genetics with which we continue to roll the dice. I’m pro-diversity and anti-monoculture. I’m anti-prejudice. I’m for the right plants grown in the right place. I’m against a kind of viticulture that is more like the curation of a museum exhibit of a single slice of history from a single place on the planet. I’m for acknowledging that the one constant of life, of nature, is change, and we had better get on that train if we want our viticultures to survive.

Losing my entire vintage is heartbreaking, but if I hadn’t tried to grow these vines, if I hadn’t put my heart into Crenshaw Cru, I might never have felt the consequences of believing the lie. If I wasn’t so intimately connected to the farming of my wine, I might have indefinitely ignored the real costs of an unquestioned belief in the genetic superiority of vinifera.  

I planted the front yard with vinifera because I never questioned that foundational belief, because I had internalized that lie. That lie led me to prioritize my ignorant flavor preferences without any consideration for the needs of my land, the voice of this place on the earth. The vineyard grew out of that lie and that mindset. And its fruit is death.

That heartbreak has made me ready to be a better farmer. I’m ready to start listening. I’m ready to eradicate prejudice. I’m ready to explode limits and think creatively. I’m ready to build a true local wine culture. I’m ready to start cultivating life.

- Adam Huss
August 2023

PS.

I wanted to make a strong case for hybrids in Mediterranean climates here. This is really about eliminating prejudice and resetting our thinking so that wine becomes a process of continual discovery, rather than a quest to clone a handful of holy grails . But I want to be clear that everything else I said about observing and listening to your land and knowing your soil and local conditions still applies to hybrids. My friends who grow hybrids on the East Coast of the US, with only a very few exceptions, will let you know that outside of a Mediterranean climate you still have to spray hybrid grapes and carefully manage the canopy if you want to get a consistent crop. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that hybrids are a magic bullet. But if you grow grapes in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas … and let’s add most of Chile, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa… and, you know, every country that borders the Mediterranean… you may find that growing hybrid grapes eliminates the need to spray much if anything in the way of fungicides. And if you’re anywhere else in the world that is not a Mediterranean climate you’ll likely find that growing hybrids means you’ll be able to a) save time and resources, and b) grow organically, whereas if you try to grow vinifera organically you’ll fail 3 vintages out of 4 or more and spend a lot more time failing.

These are generalizations, of course. Even vinifera exhibit different levels of resistance to fungi, and growing them on their own roots versus on rootstock makes a difference as well. But vinifera are significantly less resistant than the vast majority of hybrids. Grapes were hybridized, after all, to make vinifera more resistant to fungi and able to withstand more extreme temperatures, especially freezing winters. Hybrids can contain the genetics of multiple species, however, and so each one has different strengths and weaknesses.

But let’s start by stopping the binary thinking, with vinifera on one side and hybrids in opposition on the other. The future of wine, if we hope to have one, is in the diversity of genetics. In finding what works well in your climate versus putting something there because only it is considered fine wine. The future of our viticultures is in a process of continual adaptation and selection as we react to a changing world. Start with a principle of “If it can’t produce a crop if I don’t spray it, then it isn’t meant to be here,” and go from there. Nature will tell you what you should use to make wine where you are.