Fifteen years ago I started a tiny backyard vineyard, which I named Yippee Calle. With the help of my mentor George, I rooted cuttings of Zweigelt, an Austrian red, and eventually got 55 vines established. For the first few years I climbed a steep learning curve, both in the growing and the winemaking. Over time, my vintages varied from undrinkable cooking wine to passable plonk, with the occasional delectable year in between.

Fast forward to early January of 2024. Not much insulating snow on the ground, and it had been a long, open fall, so the grapevines are not fully hardened off. Okanagan temperatures suddenly drop into the minus twenties, for several days. A few places hit minus thirty. Vines up and down the Valley, including mine, took a silent body blow. Come spring I studied my bare trunks and cordons on a daily basis, looking forlornly for any sign of growth. Finally, in June, I began to see some tiny green sprouts, not on the cordons where they should be, but coming out of the ground around the dead trunks. To keep track, I hung pieces of red tape above each vine and started a daily count. If I saw a basal shoot, I removed the tag. It was an agonizing few weeks as I started from 54 Presumed Dead, then down to 44, then to 20, and finally, to 6 for sure dead.

So now I was catapulted into a totally new phase of viticulture: caring for basal shoots after the parent trunk and cordons have given up the ghost. As the spring progressed, some trunks had five, six or seven vigorous basal shoots. How many sprouts should I keep?  Dunno. George said, prune conservatively. You won’t have a crop this year anyhow, and the vines can use all that foliage to recover their vigor.

As we moved into full summer and the heat dome, the shoots took off, sometimes lengthening a hands’ breadth overnight. The upright ones were head height and more. They were also quite fragile and unless they were supported, a moderate breeze could snap them off at the base. So I spent a lot of time gently elevating the sprouts and securing them to a wire or a bamboo stake.

I desperately wanted to replace the six dead vines, so I cut off some tiny green side shoots, soaked them in water overnight, treated them with rooting hormone, and put them in small pots inside, near a window. Even while misting them twice a day, the little shoots simply gave up the ghost, tragically brown corpses lying flat on their pots. Subsequently reading up on how to start greenshoot cuttings, I was informed that they should be misted for 10 seconds, every 90 seconds, for the first week. So much for that idea. 

Reading further, I stumbled on layering, and now that concept has become my passion. Some of my basal sprouts were ground-oriented, rather than upright. So for this chosen few, I dug shallow trenches underneath them. Then I snipped off a few leaves from the middle of the shoot and carefully buried that portion, still connected to the main stem, but leaving the last few terminal leaves exposed.  The theory here is the shoot can still receive nutrients from the main stem as it goes about producing roots on the buried part. Eventually, and with the assent of the wine gods, the shoot will have enough roots and vigor to become a new, separate plant on its own. At which point I will yell yippie ki yay. I will also remind myself of the scale of my disaster recovery; a tiny microcosm of what the entire Okanagan wine industry is going through. 

Dionysus (aka Bacchus) is the god of winemaking. He also advocated for ecstatic (eleutheric) dancing, to free oneself from care. I could use some of that. All this work is in the service of a glass of red wine, my vernacular sacred.