Oregon Vine Density?

I’m becoming more and more convinced of the importance of vine density. This article lays out some of the Sonoma growers who are planting denser:

https://www.princeofpinot.com/article/873/

but what vineyards in Oregon have some of the highest density? I saw some evidence at Pearl Morissette (Beamsville Bench) in the advantages of high density and have seen William Kelley espouse the importance of ultra high vine density–but the idea seems to be slow coming to America. I think it also increases disease pressure and all but eliminates any mechanical picking.

I would say if all the things that matter in vineyards high vine density is either near or at the bottom.

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Sure, ideally there would be some old vines with selection massale to increase density at a great site in Ribbon Ridge or Eola-Amity that is SE facing with a good slope…but I do think it is important?

Honestly, my experience is that high vine density has little to no bearing on quality and substantially increases expense. Doesn’t mean I’m right, just saying that nearly 30 years of working with any multitude of vine spacings all over the WV has led me to conclude that I simply don’t care about that. The highest vine density planting in our Estate Vineyard is toward the bottom in overall quality and consistency vis a vis the rest of the vineyard.

Other people will have differing opinions. That’s fine. I’m just telling you that the site matters most and just because you have 4,000 vpa doesn’t mean you’ll get better fruit than at 1,000 vpa.

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So you’re saying your village site, at the bottom of the hill (with higher vine density) produces just as good grapes as your 1er and Grand Cru sites up the hill (with lower density)?

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I think 4,000 vines per acre is common in Burgundy and the high density that Kelley is talking about has 14,000+ vines per hectare (5,600 vines per acre).

I do think there is probably no effect until the density hits a point where the vines are struggling against one another for resources?

https://wineimport.discoursehosting.net/t/tn-2012-hubert-lamy-saint-aubin-1er-cru-derriere-chez-edouard-cuvee-haute-densite/175921/2

I don’t get it.

Just because Burgundy is high-density doesn’t mean anything to me. I think Bonnes Mares or wherever would be fine at lower densities.

Maresh, Weber, Hyland, Ridgecrest, old vine Seve Springs, portions of my Estate, Durant and on and on are low density sites and produce amazing wine. I don’t think that tightening the spacing would make them better. DDO is right next to Durant and very near to Balcombe Vineyard. Is DDO better than those two sites? It’s tighter spaces for sure.

To me this is like lots of vineyard/winery discussion stuff. If you tasted 10 wines blind could you tell which ones were the high vpa sites? No. It would be impossible. They (likely) wouldn’t be the 5 best wines. I get that the point is that a lower vpa site that’s excellent would be THAT much more excellent with high vpa. I would say that’s not really how it works.

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Okay. That’s a fine anecdote. I’m sure the wine was great. I don’t know that that proves anything. I’m sure the winery in question would say it does.

I’ll say this, based on the link.

If “Domaine Jean-Marc Vincent was established by Jean-Marc and his wife, Anne-Marie, in 1997,” and if “one of their first experiments was with high-density plantations,” then how can their “cuvée of Le Passetemps… from a 0.5-hectare parcel… planted in high density” also be “of 60-year-old fine Pinot Noir vines”?

Obviously you didn’t write that Josh, so you’re not responsible, but I’m allergic to double-talk so it jumps out at me when someone does it.

As to the relationship between density and quality, I have no opinion.

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I think one of the big challenges in determining the effect of HD plantings is also one of the big challenges of evaluating biodynamics: There’s an elevated level of attention that’s required to the site, which probably translates to good things regardless of the independent variable. Also, the people who are very enthusiastic about high-density plantings and are willing to incur the expense that’s involved are probably very quality focused in all of their other work.

In the Willamette Valley, X-Novo comes to mind as a high-density site—and it clearly produces exceptional wines. But how much of that is a)that it’s planted to a mixture of clones that build in complexity, b)that it’s owned by Craig Williams, who’s as quality-focused as they come, and c) is turned into wine by the likes of Ken Pahlow and Seth Morgen-Long? I don’t know and certainly wouldn’t be surprised if the density was a positive, but it’s hard to separate out.

I’ve yet to taste the Lamy HD bottling, much less next to its “standard density” counterpart, but I’d imagine that you’d have some of the same “attentiveness” noise in the data (so to speak) if trying to evaluate it. That said, I trust when William Kelley (and others) think of it as superior to the standard edition. If anyone in the Portland area owns both and wants to pop some, I’m in.

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I hope I’ve been a bit more nuanced than that! While I’m convinced that it can be a very interesting technique in Burgundy, it raises questions too (after all, in drier conditions, the obvious adaptation would be to diminish rather than enhance planting density; and high densities pretty much preclude permaculture), and as with everything viticultural, one cannot simply transpose what works in Burgundy to another region. Certainly, adopting Bordelais spacing and trellising didn’t work out so well in Napa.

In terms of what has been done in Burgundy, the traditional density on the Côte d’Or is 10-12,000 vines per hectare, so give or take 5,000 vines per acre. With some of the high density experiments of people like Lamy, we are looking at over 10,000 vines per acre. So this is really a totally different model. For pruning, it’s a nightmare.

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I don’t think it’s so much intentional double-talk as a bit of confusion. In fact, the Passetemps cuvée from Vincent contains both recently planted high density Pinot Fin, and some older vines of less good genetic quality (back in the day, very little high quality Pinot Noir genetics was planted in Santenay).

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That’s really interesting William. The only Santenay I own, I bought based on your review. This is what you said:

The 2019 Elodie Roy Santenay 1er Cru Les Gravières derives from a parcel at the southern end of this large climat, which was > planted in the early 1950s and where missing vines have never been replaced> . Delivering aromas of sweet red berries, orange rind, rose petals and spices, it’s medium to full-bodied, layered and perfumed, with lively acids and powdery tannins that assert themselves on the saline finish.

As I wrote last year, Elodie Roy worked for more than a decade at Domaine Anne Gros in Vosne-Romanée before establishing her own nine-hectare estate in 2018, working with vineyards planted by her father and grandfather. Sustainable farming has been an emphasis from the start, and Roy has begun working the soil, moving away from herbicides. Reds are vinified in cement tanks, retaining some stems and pumping over rather than punching down. For reds and whites alike, maturation takes place in a mix of barrels and tank. The 2019 vintage has turned out nicely, though some cuvées did show their comparatively lofty alcoholic degree. (drink 2022-2038)

How does Elodie Roy’s vineyard fit in with that reality about genetics in old Santenay PN you pointed out (was it one of the few good ones)?

(On a side note, I was worried about the “comparatively lofty alcoholic degree” you mentioned as to her 2019 collection as a whole, but my note on CT says I shouldn’t have, as it’s well balanced.)

Poor genetics are mitigated by age, as yields diminish and virus changes cluster morphology. If anything, vine age is especially beneficial when genetics are sub-optimal.

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I feel grossly uninformed now, and please excuse the perhaps noob question, but, a virus changes cluster morphology? There’s a virus that’s good for Pinot Noir?

There are a lot of viruses that infect grapevines. In Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, “court-noué” or fan leaf virus, of which nematodes are the vector, results in smaller clusters with smaller berries. Up to a point, this can enhance wine quality in these varieties. Tell that to someone who works with tannic varieties and they will laugh at you, and obviously it reduces yield a lot too, but in Pinot and Chardonnay it can make for more concentrated, textural wines. Olivier Collin’s Les Roises in Champagne, for example, suffers from court-noué. The healthier the vine in other respects, the more moderate the expression of the virus will be.

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Except that grass/ground cover is far more effective at competition for resources than vines are. The viticulturists who set up high tech irrigation schedules run calculations based on grass farming in whatever region they are in, and multiply that by a fraction significantly less than 1 in order to get the amount consumed by a grape vine. So if you are worried about increasing competition for your vines, you can just stop tilling. Decrease available resources, and increase soil health/structure and beneficial insect habitat in one go!

Increasing density to a high degree (so that there is no room for a tractor to drive through) you are certainly reducing sunlight and airflow in addition to nitrogen and water, though I would hardly see this as a bonus for quality. For organic farming in Oregon’s climate it is a distinct negative as well, as your best assist to your spray program is sunlight and airflow.

As far as taking an old vine planting and interspacing with more vines to increase planting density… if the old vines were already low vigor and having a hard time filling the wire that might work (with providing a fun story and increasing your yields at least :wink: But if the established vine is already filling the wire, and you shorten the fruiting cane by half, you are going to explode your vigor. The vine now has half the number of buds on the wire to push all its energy/resources into. The opposite of what you were looking for.



For the rest… I agree with Jim.

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I don’t agree Saul.

Ex-Novo has no low density vines to compare it to. Nor do I actually believe that Craig is a superior farmer to many other experienced WV growers. (Sorry Craig as I know that you check the board somewhat regularly). And while it is a superlative Chardonnay site and Walter Scott make superlative wines from it, Tyson Crowley does the same with Four Winds, JP at Clos Electrique, and we make extremely good Chardonnay wines from 5x7 planting at Whistling Ridge and 5x8 at Temperance Hill(ugh…the ego in that statement is a bit much but it’s the site that deserves the credit). And while I will not name names, one of the worst tastings I ever had in a cellar was with someone who had planted meter by meter.


IMO: Ex-Novo is simply a great site, and Craig’s brilliant decision to embrace clonal diversity in planting is a stroke of very high intelligence(not the same as farming which is ongoing, and Craig is an excellent farmer just not separated from anyone else in the elite tier.)

But ultimately, great wine is made by the vineyard.

My beliefs align exactly with Jim’s(and Megan’s). Proof, enough for me, can be found in Jim’s list of old vine widely spaced plantings, and I would add Cristom’s Marjorie vineyard was 12 foot row spacing and until going down to phylloxera produced the best wines from the estate(a belief also shared by Steve Doerner). This is a vineyard that produced what I felt were the wines of the vintage for 5 years out of 8 from 1993-2000. You can also add the West Field at Temperance Hill, a single high wire planting with 12 foot rows that is where Evesham Wood has always gotten their fruit from. And that I thought highly enough of to buy 10 extra tons of 2020 THV fruit in order to acquire a portion of West Field going forward.

I don’t speak for how high density plantings work in other regions, I am ignorant of anywhere but the Willamette Valley. That said, when someone speaks up for high density planting it should be noted that ground cover in other regions may not be as aggressive a grower during the Spring as we have in the WV. So they may need the vines to be the competition.

And we should consider:
6x10 spacing is 726 plants per acre
5x8 spacing is 1089 plants per acre
5x7 spacing is 1245 plants per acre
5x5 spacing is 1742 plants per acre
4x4 spacing is 2722 plants per acre

Cluster size tends to be similar regardless of density. I worked with 5x5 for several years and cluster sizes were at least 95% of other sites I worked with.
At 4x4(approximately meter by meter) trellis is almost certainly single guyot as opposed to double, which does reduce yields per plant by about 20%.
But assuming that thinning to 1 cluster per shoot produces 2 tpa(tons per acre) in 5x8 spacing, you get about 1.5 tpa from 6x10(consistent with my experience), about 2.25 tpa from 5x7(also consistent with my experience), and 4.0 tpa from meter by meter(after accounting for the switch to single guyot). That is a heck of a yield difference. And while it does require investing in some fancier expensive machinery and more hand labor during the growing season, for ANY region with fine wine pricing and severe limitations of plantable area, the financials behind meter by meter are inarguably better. But screw the financials, if you have .3 hectare of Chambertin/Clos de Beze wouldn’t you want double the fruit from it? It’s a magical place. I certainly wish the Chardonnay at Whistling Ridge was meter by meter. I don’t think it would be better, but it’s a magical place and I would love to get to make a bit more of it.

But Oregon doesn’t have the constriction of AVA or plantable acreage. Nor did anyone have the capital to plant meter by meter in the early days, nor did the wine prices support that type of investment. The first to do so, were DDO. And those vineyards produce wines that are excellent, but no more so than their neighbors do. It’s a subjective level of difference. But as Oregon continues to plant and develop gravitas for specific sites(and corresponding costs), it will become more meaningful to be densely planted in those vineyards.

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Thanks for the great and informative discussion all. I think this is one of those conversations where it’s easy to rationalize why something might be without having any hard facts to back it up.

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