King Vineyard
If you were an Okanagan grape grower in the late nineties and a visiting French vigneron made a comment about your vineyard, you would naturally pay attention. “We’d been growing grapes for eight years and there was a tour of owners and winemakers from France,” recalls Rod King of King Family Vineyards in Naramata. “This older gentlemen came up to me and said, you know Mr. King, this will never work, you will never be able to grow any quality.”
King panicked. “I had a lot of respect for this guy, he had decades of track record,” says King. “He said to me, ‘You do know low yield is essential for high quality?’ I thought, oh god, we are in trouble.”
The low yield/high quality relationship is a popular theme in grape growing. It’s something that the Kings have been able to dispel, and in turn run a profitable vineyard, following the example of successful viticulturists in New Zealand. Their training system is based on the advice of the local extension agent and a scientist from AAFC Summerland.
The low apple prices BC growers have seen for the last couple of years seem like déjà vu for the Kings. “The current poor apple prices are putting growers in the exact same position we were in back in 1992 when my brother Don and I planted our first eight acres of grapes,” King recalls. “We had looked at ways to diversify from our tree fruit business - ginseng and ostriches were all the rage - and friends in the industry urged us to try grapes.”
But King wasn’t impressed when they ran the numbers through a business plan. “When we looked at the typical vertical shoot positioning training system (VSP), with a yield of 4 tons to the acre and the average wine grape prices, we would just break even. We wouldn’t be any farther ahead than with our tree fruits,” he says. King wondered if they could increase their yield to make the vineyard more profitable.
The first step was to talk with provincial grape specialist John Vielvoye. “John did so much to get the grape industry on it’s feet back in the 1990’s,” says King. “He came out and looked at our site and he recognized the vigour that we had to deal with. We have very fertile soil.”
Indeed, some 12-15 feet of topsoil with very high organic matter covers most of the King’s 40 acres. The dwarfing rootstocks the Kings used to support their apple trees would only keep them in check for about six years. “After that we had a hell of a time controlling the vigour,” he says. “John suggested I talk to Andy Reynolds (Research Scientist, Viticulture, AAFC) at Summerland about different grape planting styles.”
Photo by Tom Walker
Rod and Ian King
Rod and Ian King on their Naramata vineyard.
Reynolds was just finishing an eight-year grape training systems trial looking at what would work well for growers in the Okanagan valley. He was evaluating VSP as well as Scott Henry, Geneva Double Curtain, and several others, recalls King. “He wanted to see what worked best across the valley and at the Summerland site, which also has really good soil.”
The trials followed the vine production right through to wine making and then blind tastings, King explains. “I was actually able to sit in on some of the tastings. I think the dozen or so winemakers who attended were from most of the wineries in the valley.”
The Kings looked at the data that Reynolds had collected, including labour costs. They had sampled the wine, and they went all in. “Andy wasn’t aware of any other planting like this in North America at the time,” says King. “It came out of New Zealand. Dr Richard Smart developed it for high vigour sites down there.”
“The training system we use doesn’t have a name,” King explains. “We call it a double Scott Henry with a V. We are putting twice the crop load of a typical Scott Henry on a given root system.”
The Kings plant their chosen variety on root stock and select two main-stem trunks. The trunks are angled at 30’ off vertical to form a ‘V’ shape and attached to wires that are 4 feet apart. The Scott Henry system trains the vines into two sets of cordons, an upper and lower, rather than the single set of cordons in a VSP system. The shoots on the top cordons grow vertically, but the shoots on the bottom cordons grow downward. Each cordon row supports fruit, so there is a greater yield, but the canopy is also divided up and down and is more open providing more light than VSP.
A robust plant can support a lot of fruit, son Ian explains. “The amount of fruit per square foot or square centimeter of leaf area on our trellis is the same ratio as a standard VSP,” says Ian. “We have double the fruit, but we also have double the leaf area per acre. The trellis can support it, which means all things being equal, you have the same quality of grape someone else would have at four tons, but we can have eight.” This system would not work on the sandy soils of the south Okanagan. It requires the vigour of the King’s site to drive the fruit production.
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Photo by Tom Walker
King family trellis system
A close up of the King family trellis system.
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Photo by Tom Walker
Trellis in Summer
The King Family Vineyard in Summer
“Our input costs are about 50 per cent higher than a standard trellis system, you have double the wire and roughly double the labour to install, but everything else is about the same cost,” notes Ian.
They have to be very careful on canopy management and not get behind, but there is nothing unusual about the system, King explains. “We need a lot of labour through the season but that means we are also able to provide steady work from the beginning of February. Some of my crew planted these original vines,” he notes with pride.
Ian explains that clusters are thinned for a 2/3 to 1/3 split. “Generally we will leave two clusters per shoot on the top cordon and one cluster on the bottom,” he says. “With reds that might go down to one on top and one per shoot or every second shoot on the bottom.”
The Kings average about seven tons per acre on their reds, like Merlot and Cab Franc, and eight to 8.5 tons on their whites, such as Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and Auxerrois. In the early days, they sold their grapes to Cedar Creek winery. Now most of their production goes to Peller Estates under long-term contract.
After the comments from the French winemaker, King turned to Andy Reynolds for confirmation and Reynolds suggested they do a trial on their own site. “We took a Merlot block that was in full production and we managed for different crop loads of 4,6,8 and 12 tons per acre,” says King. “It was a nightmare to harvest but we did it for three years and had Cedar Creek make the wine.”
At four tons to the acre the grape clusters were massive. “They were the size of a leg of lamb. The outside grapes were ripe, but the insides were still green,” King says. “Six tons per acre was pretty good, but the vines were still really bushy and we needed lots more labour to keep them in check.” At 12 tons per acre there was less labour and still reasonable clusters, but King says fruit quality suffered as the clusters shaded each other. “Eight tons was the sweet spot, which was great, because after the Frenchmen’s visit we were worried that we had made a mistake and wouldn’t be able to sell our grapes.”
And that, of course, is the whole point. The Kings have a profitable farming business that has enabled son Ian to come on board. “In the late 90’s Lee Cartier (business professor at Okanagan College) did a complete analysis of the cost of production for grapes, not including land costs.” says King. “His analysis concurred with what we had figured out on our own. It just doesn’t make any sense at 4 tons, and I think it is still true today. “
The Kings also say they don’t need or want to build a winery. “Why do you think there are 400 wineries in the valley?” King jokes. “I’m losing money growing grapes and I can’t sell them, so I lose more money by building a winery?”
King says they are happy with what they are doing. “After we put the last bin of grapes on the truck we can start to relax, but the winemakers are just starting to get busy.” ■