5 Things to Consider Before Planting Wine Grapes + Bonus Tip

So you've been making wine at home and you're thinking about growing your own grapes to make wine? Well, we have some things for you to consider. Hi, I'm Carlos from Rancho Las Brisas and we've been making wine, award-winning wine, for over 20 years. These are our five considerations and we have one bonus tip for you at the end. Your first consideration, if you're going to think about growing grapes to make your own wine, is to think about what you're going to do with all your grapes. Here at Rancho Las Brisas in Sonoma County, we have 20 rows and each row has 30 plants in it. We get somewhere between 200 and 250 pounds of grapes for each one of those rows. So, you know, at a minimum we're getting about 4,000 pounds of grapes out of our area and 4,000 pounds of grapes yields 80 cases of wine. Now, I always struggle trying to remember how to convert from pounds of grapes to wine, but I have a fundamental principle that I always remember and that is 100 pounds of grapes yields five gallons of wine yields two cases. So, 4,000 divided by 100 gives me 40. 40 times 2 gives me 80 cases of wine. So, your first consideration is what are you going to do with your bounty? The second thing you need to consider if you are thinking about growing your own grapes to make wine is varietal selection. Well, here at Rancho Las Brisas, we're in the Petaluma Gap and personally we like to drink heavy reds, cabs, zins, merlots, those kinds of wines. We tried growing Syrah, which is a heavy wine in our region, but we didn't have any success with it. It was very difficult to ripen, so we had to convert our Syrah plants by grafting on Pinot, which does really well here. So, your second consideration is to think about where you're growing your grapes and the varietal that you can select. Here in the Petaluma Gap, Pinot Noir, Albarino, and Chardonnay, those are the grapes to grow here. The third thing you need to consider is vineyard management. When I think about vineyard management, I think about three big components. The first component is what are you going to do with all of these canes and who's going to put the canes in their trellises? Who's going to maintain all these trellises? So, canopy management is huge. You know, eventually we're going to have to come through here, cut this off, we're going to take this cane, take it off someplace to get it composted. And so, canopy management is a really important part of vineyard management. The second part of vineyard management, and it's the one that I think about the most, is how are you going to manage powdery mildew? So, here in the Petaluma Gap, it's an issue. And what powdery mildew is, is a fungus that will come in and it will reduce the quality of the grapes, actually create problems of a cluster breaking open and contaminating that entire cluster. And so, to control powdery mildew, beginning in late March, all the way through veraison, that's when the grapes start turning color, we have to spray every week. We're using only organic compounds here at Rancho Las Brisas. So, sulfur, potassium carbonate, collard green, or no-stop, or oil. And that's what we use to control the powdery mildew. But every week, from the end of March, all the way through the end of July. And the other part of the vineyard management that you have to think about is how are you going to go deal with the weeds? The weeds are a problem. So, we do tilling in the rows, we use vinegar spray, we use a shovel to go after the weeds, but that's a lot of work. And so, if you're going to grow your own grapes to make wine, you have to think about those three components of vineyard management. So, your fourth consideration, if you're thinking about planting your own grapes to make wine, is to think about the costs. And so, you have startup costs that you need to manage, and you have recurring costs that you need to manage. The startup costs are, how much is that plant going to cost you? How much is that graphing going to cost you? How much is this stick, this post going to cost you? How much is it going to cost the wire? How are you going to prep the soil? All those startup costs are something that you need to think about. And then you need to think about the recurring costs. Well, so what are the recurring costs for us? Well, we have organic chemicals that we're buying, we have labor that we bring in to help with part of the canopy management, some of the vineyard management pieces. We have the equipment for harvesting, moving the grapes, for crushing, for pressing. All those things are part of the costs, both startup costs and recurring costs, that you need to think about if you're going to start growing your own grapes to make wine. And don't forget about water. Now, I don't know where you live, but here in the Petaluma Gap, we water on a regular basis. And so, beginning in April or so, late April, once the ground starts drying up, we start turning in our drip emitters on the plants for about six hours a week, which is about three gallons. So we're putting about three gallons of water from our well onto the grapes from now until the time that we harvest. Of course, we control that water flow depending on how hot it is. And the closer we get to harvest, we'll make adjustments to that water because we want to make sure that we get the bricks just right. So the fifth consideration, if you're thinking about growing your grapes to make your own wine, is to think about the impact on your personal schedule. As I mentioned on the earlier consideration, we have all the spraying that we have to do. Are you going to personally do that? Are you going to have to be here, in our case, every Wednesday to spray? Or you have to think about when the grapes are going to be ready. I cannot plan to travel from the end of July through the end of September. Why? Because the grapes might come in. And if you're growing your own grapes to make your own wine, you want to pick at the perfect time. The grapes will be ready when they're ready, and it might be as early, it might be early August, or it might be mid-September. But I have to stay here until I press the last bunch of red grapes to make red wine. So that impact on your personal time is your fifth consideration. So those are the five things to consider if you're growing your own grapes to make your own wine. And here's a bonus tip for you. Buy your grapes on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. However, I will say this. There is a level of personal joy and warmth that you get when you make your wine with grapes that you tended. And to see my daughter walk down that row picking grapes, or my granddaughter run down the row like she owns it, brings me the greatest joy of my life. If you like our content, consider liking and subscribing, and check out some of our other videos.