Grapes: a vine for a lifetime

The grapevine, Vitis vinifera, carries a name given by Linnaeus himself: Vitis is Latin for “vine”, and vinifera means “wine-bearing”. Angur, üzüm, inab, Traube, uva, vinograd and stafyli are all names for this same plant. Its partnership with people is among the oldest in farming. Residues in pottery jars about 8,000 years old, found at two sites in Georgia, are currently the earliest confirmed evidence of winemaking, and a complete Copper Age winery, with a press, fermentation jars and grape pips, was found in the Areni-1 cave in Armenia, dated to around 4100 BC.

Today the vine grows around the Mediterranean, in the Caucasus and Central Asia, in southern Africa and the Middle East, and on the temperate coasts of the Americas and Oceania. In Luxembourg, this issue's country, the vineyards line the Moselle on the eastern border, giving white wines and the sparkling Crémant de Luxembourg. The little wine village of Schengen, which gave its name to Europe's border-free travel agreement, sits among them.

A climber, not a tree

A grapevine is a liana, a woody vine that climbs with coiling tendrils. It cannot hold its own weight like a tree trunk. Left alone, it sprawls, pours its energy into leaves and leaves its fruit lying in the dirt. On a farm, a trellis of posts and wires lifts the fruit into sun and moving air, which improves quality and lowers disease. The guide's first rule is to build the trellis before planting, because adding one to established vines is a much harder correction.

Two plants in one

Almost every commercial grapevine alive today is two plants grafted together: a fruiting variety on top, and the root of a different, American grape species below. The reason is a tiny root-feeding insect, phylloxera, native to eastern North America. Carried to Europe on American vines in the mid-1800s, it found the roots of Vitis vinifera undefended and devastated vineyards across France and beyond. Growers learned through painstaking trials that American rootstocks seal off phylloxera wounds. Grafting saved Europe's vineyards and remains the standard today. There is still no chemical cure once phylloxera is established in an ungrafted vine.

So the guide asks you to choose two things together: a fruiting variety for your market, and a rootstock for your soil and pests. Both should come from a certified nursery that tests its mother plants for grapevine viruses, because a virus carried in at planting cannot be cured later.

Decide your market first

Few crops split as sharply as grapes. Table grapes are judged on looks above almost everything: large, uniform, often seedless berries with flawless skin. Wine grapes are judged on what is inside the berry, above all sugar and acid; most table wines are picked at about 19 to 25 degrees Brix, a measure of sugar read with a handheld refractometer. Raisin grapes need high sugar and thin skins that dry evenly without splitting. The three markets disagree about what a good grape is, so the decision comes before the variety, the pruning, the watering and the harvest method.

Patience, then pruning

A new vineyard gives no real harvest for about two years, a first small crop around year three and full yield in year four or five. After that, a well-run vineyard commonly stays productive for 25 to 30 years, and a vine kept longer can bear for a century or more. The Great Vine at Hampton Court Palace in England, planted in 1768, still crops more than 250 years later.

The vine also needs a real winter cold period to go dormant and break bud properly, which makes a frost-free tropical site the wrong place for it. Every winter, during dormancy, it is pruned back hard. An unpruned vine sets far more buds than it can ripen: more fruit, and worse fruit. Spur pruning cuts short stubs on a permanent arm back to two or three buds; cane pruning replaces the fruiting canes each year.

Build the trellis, choose the graft and the market together, and fight the season-long fungal war every single year.

Frost, flowers and véraison

Young shoots have almost no frost tolerance, so one cold night after bud break can destroy a year's crop. Grape flowers are mostly self-pollinated, but cool, wet or windy weather at flowering can still cost yield through poor fruit set. In late summer comes véraison, when berries change colour and soften: red varieties turn red or purple, white ones a translucent gold. From that moment sugar rises sharply, acid falls, and birds take notice. Wine growers then sample berries from across the block and follow the trend in Brix and acidity, not a single reading.

The fight that never stops

Powdery mildew and downy mildew do not wait for one weak stage; they threaten the vine from bud break to harvest every year. Open canopies, clean pruning and a spray programme rotated by mode-of-action group are part of growing grapes well. Laisha never names a pesticide brand or compound: the guide names the group and sends you to a licensed dealer and to the label. Newer fungus-resistant varieties are being bred to cut fungicide use. Some threats cannot be sprayed away at all: Pierce's disease, a bacterial disease spread by insects, can kill a vine within three to five years and has no cure, so prevention is everything.