A lot has changed.
Looking over the vineyard his family has cultivated into fine
wine for nearly 80 years, Winemaker George Gugleilmo has a hard
time imagining it being the same as his grandfather saw it when the
family first took over their Morgan Hill site.
A lot has changed.
Looking over the vineyard his family has cultivated into fine wine for nearly 80 years, Winemaker George Gugleilmo has a hard time imagining it being the same as his grandfather saw it when the family first took over their Morgan Hill site.
“It used to be that you could recognize the cars and know who it was as they drove by,” Guglielmo said. “That’s changed.”
The days when it was rare to see a car drive by on Main Street are long gone now, especially with Live Oak High School having been built right across the street from the vineyards in the 1970s.
“It used to be a prune field,” Gulgielmo said.
But that’s just scratching the surface when it comes to the differences Guglielmo sees in the wine industry every day. In fact, there’s only one thing that instantly comes to mind that has never changed, at least in the fields.
“We still pick by hand, just like we always have,” he said.
At this time of year, grape vines are just about to begin sprouting, or as Pietra Santa Winemaker Alessio Carli calls it, “bud breaking,” around this time of year. From there, the vines begin a full growing season. By June or July, long green canopies have taken over the landscape. In August, the vines begin turning a brown color and become more wood-like, an important stage in the process. Soon the grapes turn color and are ready for picking. By winter, the leaves fall off of the vines, and in January the plants are pruned and the process begins again.
But the process in how the vines are cultivated is different wherever you go due to styles, flavors and technology.
“I always look to technology in wine making,” Carli said.
Thanks to advances made throughout the last 50 years, vintners are spending less time in the fields while having more control over the consistency and flavor of their wines. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that wine drinkers are walking away with a synthetic brew, either.
“We’re going back to our old roots in farming,” he said. “They are going back to more organic fertilizer, less use of chemicals.
“I do much less of using chemicals, but not because I’m going organic,” he said. “I just like to work with nature.”
However, even from the purchasing of a plant, things are different.
“Root stalks, grape vines and clones … people are trying different things,” Gilroy winery owner Gino Fortino said. “There’s probably 40 or 50 different types of root.”
Fortino also said that for each variety of grape, there can be as many as 10 clones that have been created that claim to create a better-tasting wine.
Carli said the new vines make a huge difference, because the new types of root stalk are genetically made to withstand illnesses and rotting.
“We try to farm it old fashioned, but when you buy a plant, genetically they (aren’t the same),” he said. “Some root stalk already is resistant to sickness.”
The type of vine growth is different, too, Guglielmo said.
Guglielmo has set up a bilateral cordon style of field in any new vineyard he has planted in the last 20 years.
“It opens up the vine to more growing area,” he said. “Headprune vines (the tree-like style of vines previously planted in his fields) are smaller with less production.”
There also are fewer man hours spent doing heavy labor in the fields.
“We used to hoe around each vine, now we use herbicide,” Guglielmo said.
However, even the world of using herbicide has begun to change as growers look for more natural ways to grow the vines by reducing herbicides and fungicides and keeping what Carli said is “the good bugs.”
Carli has started planting wild grasses in his fields that attract bugs that eat the insects that are harmful to the crop.
