The Growing Season Book
By: Nelson Boschman
Tags: Spirituality, Wine, Vineyard, Wine Tasting, Memoir

Excerpt from Chapter Two, “The Fine Line”

“Where should I go this time? Have you tried anything new lately?”

These are questions I always ask my friend Pam, who lives in Oliver, BC, the wine capital of Canada. We had managed to get up to the Okanagan during the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when travel restrictions weren’t preventing us from doing so.

“You’ve gotta try Vin Amite,” she replied. Pam was always ready with a few good recommendations. “They’re making some really lovely wines, and have been getting some well-deserved attention lately.”

I hadn’t been there before, but was curious to sample their portfolio. So I made an appointment. On this particular trip, I wasn’t able to hit as many tasting rooms as I would have liked. This was largely due to COVID-related challenges, which increased the necessity of booking appointments in advance. So I felt compelled to make the most of this visit — to take my time, to learn what I could about that particular winery, and to prepare my palate.

I know what you’re thinking: Prepare your palate? You say you’re not a wine snob, but come on.

I get it. Palate prep might seem like next-level wine nerdery, but I assure you it’s not. Let me explain why.

During that same trip, I was reading What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking by Terry Theise (rhymes with “peace”), who, besides being my favourite wine writer, is an American importer of boutique wines from Germany, Austria, and Champagne. Translation: he’s a professional taster. As far as Theise is concerned, to do his work with integrity requires an unusual-for-the-rest-of-us degree of attention to what’s going on with his palate. Especially when he’s trying to determine which wines he may want to import for the North American market.

Theise writes, “I am notorious for not eating lunch on tasting days, much to the chagrin of anyone travelling with me, who eventually learns to pack sandwiches from the breakfast spread. I’m also ridiculously careful at breakfast; one itty-bitty slice of smoked salmon will falsify my palate for several hours. I’m militantly against chives for similar reasons.”¹

I can still hear your thoughts. Sure, that makes sense for someone who’s tasting and selecting wines for an entire continent. But there’s no need for me to be that obsessive.

Perhaps not. But Thiese changed my mind (and I hope he’ll change yours) when he offered this perspective: “Growers work a whole year to show me wines I’ll taste for one or two minutes. The least I can do is take care that my palate isn’t screwed up.”²

Full disclosure: I’m not Terry Theise. On my highly-anticipated tasting day (which consisted of exactly one winery, at which I tried maybe four or five wines), not screwing up my palate meant not brushing my teeth again right before leaving the house. Also I did manage to avoid chives. The last thing I wanted was to sip a lovely Bordeaux-style blend that’s supposed to taste like blackberry, plum, and vanilla, and all I’m getting is fresh mint Sensodyne.

The next time you pour yourself a glass of wine, look at it. Swirl it. Get your nose in the glass and give it a good sniff. (I humbly suggest that this is the least we can do as non-professional tasters. Even if we just brushed our teeth.) As you get ready to take your first sip, consider this: before fruit is harvested — before a single grape gets the life squeezed out of it — years of mindful, meticulous planning go into the sumptuous juice you hold in your hand…

assessing soil and climate

choosing the right grapes for the terroir

orienting rows

spacing and trellising vines

planting

watering

pruning

shoot thinning

protecting

canopy managing (aka leafing, that is, controlling the amount of sunlight and air the fruit clusters receive)

inspecting

crop thinning (this helps the vines direct their energy toward the best-quality clusters)

measuring sugar levels

watching

waiting

praying

All this happens in the vineyard.

Part of my apprenticeship included visits to several vineyards that produce fruit for Nk’Mip Cellars, as well as other Arterra brands. My tour guide was a vineyard manager named Nelson Dutra, who was responsible for 460 acres of vineyards in the south Okanagan. Vineyard Boss Nelson had an engineering background, but eventually shifted to viticulture and started working for Arterra in the early 2000s. He had a solid reputation as a hard worker. One of his colleagues told me he would bust his butt 24/7 to get ready for harvest.

Vineyard Boss Nelson picked me up at Nk’Mip around nine in the morning. It was already warm outside, and about to get warmer. He wore a faded black t-shirt, khaki jeans, and rugged-yet-comfortable-looking work boots. We hopped in his truck and drove to Sunrock vineyard.

Sunrock is a 180-acre vineyard on the Osoyoos Lake Bench. As we drove onto the site, I gasped at the monumental, south-facing granite outcropping that gives the vineyard its name. With a slope that also faces south, the pristine lake at the bottom, and its sheer size, seeing Sunrock for the first time meant I needed a minute to pick my jaw up off the ground. Vineyards like this are why many think of the Okanagan as Canada’s Napa Valley.

Every choice made in winegrowing, or viticulture, affects what ends up in the bottle — including what to grow where; trellising, training and irrigation; and pest management.

“We’re not in the business of growing grapes,” Nk’Mip Senior Winemaker Randy Picton told me one day as we were walking in a different vineyard. “We’re in the business of growing wine.” The decision of what to grow where — matching grapes to ground — is, of course, primary. When Sunrock was first planted in 1998–1999, the red varietals (types of grape) planted included 30 acres of Pinot Noir. Within a few years, it became clear that Sunrock was far too hot for Pinot. So those vines were grafted over to mainly Shiraz.

Once you’ve got the varietal you want, vineyard managers turn their attention toward curating the amount of crop they’re going to harvest.

Three crucial steps in this curation are pruning, shoot thinning, and crop thinning.

PRUNING

If you leave a grapevine to its own devices, it will eventually show you the meaning of the word sprawl. It will travel the world, spreading itself far and wide, producing as many leaves and as much fruit as it possibly can. You might think, “More grapes? Awesome! Isn’t that what you want?” Not exactly, no. When vines are left unchecked, they yield more fruit than winegrowers want. If the crop is too big, it can ripen unevenly, giving you fruit that lacks the intensity of flavour needed to make great wine. This is why you need to prune.

Pruning directs the vine’s energy so you end up with a smaller amount of the best fruit possible. It occurs between growing seasons, sometime in late winter or early spring, when vines are still dormant. The actual work of pruning involves removing canes (woody branches at least two years old) and spurs (younger branches, usually one year old). How pruning happens depends largely on the framework used to support a vine’s growth, such as a trellis, an arbour, or a pergola.

SHOOT THINNING

A second crucial aspect of vineyard care is known as shoot thinning. It happens early in the growing season. A shoot is the primary unit of vine growth. It contains stems, leaves, tendrils, and fruit. Shoots are where the action is, which is why they get heaps of attention from vineyard managers.

When Vineyard Boss Nelson and I got to Sunrock, the workers were shoot thinning. Nelson explained the process: “Once the pruning framework is set up, once the shoots start popping, we want to get our shoot count down to our desired target. To make sure we’re not getting huge contested areas where we have a whole bunch of shoots and a bunch of congestion, so you don’t have the sunlight penetration or air penetration you want.”

In essence, shoot thinning is about getting over-congested areas thinned down. It finishes the task that pruning began.

CROP THINNING

A little later during the growing season, another step is required. Crop thinning, also known as cluster thinning or cluster removal, refers to the removal of flower and grape clusters on the vine. One reason to thin clusters is that vines have too much crop and there isn’t enough leaf area to ripen the crop as desired. This is often caused by poor shoot growth. If this happens, removing the fruit early enough gives the vine more time to ripen the crop that remains. Another reason for crop thinning is when you have good balance between crop and leaf, but the winemaker believes the wine could be better if you had less crop per vine.

As we continued our walk through Sunrock, Vineyard Boss Nelson talked about other management techniques and practices. “Irrigation is pretty important,” he said. This sounded like an understatement. “Winemakers typically want smaller berries with a high skin-to-juice ratio. They frown on pumped up, bloated berries.” The reason for this is that many of the flavour profiles and colours present within wine are produced by the skins. For example, with red varieties, skins need to sit with the pulp for a week to get the colour extraction and a lot of the flavours.

Vineyard Boss Nelson went on to explain that the main goal during this early phase of the growing season is to try and keep your plants happy until fruit set. That is, when the flowers begin to form berries. Once that happens, he said, “We throttle back the water and tread the fine line between starving the plants to death and giving them enough to encourage continued ripening.” A vineyard can’t just coast its way to fruitfulness. Vines have their own work to do as well, like sending their roots deeper into the soil where nourishment can be found.

Each of these choices impacts the quality, character, and style of what ends up in your glass. Are you beginning to see why prepping your palate for a tasting may not be such a crazy idea?

I think what struck me most from my time among the vines is that there are countless decisions to be made to grow them well. And each of these decisions falls along a spectrum between careful attention and tough love.

It’s a fine line. A tricky balance.

As a lot of important work tends to be.

We could also say it this way: good vineyard management is both the vinegrower doing things to the vines and allowing the vines to do their own work.