Planting the Vineyard

For the best part of six years, a crazy combination of ambition, naivety, mis-placed confidence and pig-headed determination has created Vale das Estrelas.It’s living proof that ridiculous ideas which might just work, can actually work.Continuing the theme of doing something which creates far more work than we actually have time to spend...and so utterly outside our comfort zone that it shouldn’t really be possible...we have planted a vineyard.Just a small one...but if you’ve ever planted 1,000 grape vines by hand you’ll know it’s not that small.And we’ve been doing it all against the clock.The only remaining memory of the wet winter is the lush greenery taking over the valley and the flowers now springing into life.The beautiful white and yellow esteva rock rose blooms are bursting out across the hillsides of Alentejo as the race is on to get the good plants in and the bad plants out before everything gets a lot...harder.Summer arrived this week with temperatures in the mid 20Cs, and working outside in the middle of the day started getting uncomfortable again.The weeds which used to easily just lift up out of the gravel paths are now set in stone as the soaked clay soil is turning into concrete and muddy cars become dusty cars.At least the vines are in – and a few trees and shrubs alongside them. Hopefully a few more of the plants and bushes we’ve been buying will be in the ground over the next few days...when the attention will turn to cutting back brush to abide by fire prevention laws.Thanks for reading Off-grid and Entertaining in Portugal! This post is public so feel free to share it.Planting a vineyard – it turns out – requires a lot of planning and persuading people with machines to get a series of things happening on time and in order.In the background was always the question of could we afford the time and money of another project, versus could we afford not to convert the dusty big space behind the houses into something beautiful...the first thing people see as they arrive at the Valley of the Stars.We always planned to plant a vineyard of Portuguese grapes – not because we know what we’re doing, but because we like to learn and tell the story.I’d had high hopes for a field blend – a traditional Portuguese insurance policy mix of many different grapes all harvested together when most are ripe and ready and only a few are either green or raisins.But over the last couple of years continuing our wine journey through Alentejo we’ve been seeking advice from all sides...and after deciding this would be the year to plant, the stalking of anyone who would still pick up the phone has only intensified.We’ve been worrying winemakers in the way stray dogs worry sheep.But that’s not all: we’ve been annoying oenologists, vexing viticulturists, aggravating agriculturalists, irritating irrigation experts and getting on grape growers nerves.We’ve stretched “friendly advice” to its limits.We’ve asked everyone what we should do – at least twice – and have been sending a barrage of texts and videos: “Is this how we should water the plants?” I whined.“Is it too much water? Is it not enough? Did they go in early enough? Did they go in too late? Will they sprout? They’re not sprouting. Are they dead? Maybe they’re still sleeping.”And that’s just been the last week of worries for a would-be winemaker.It all started much earlier with a few friends and friends of friends in the know and in the business dropping by to advise us how to grow the best grapes and make the best wine from our cleared eucalyptus forest.The patch of fast-growing, soil-poisoning, water-hungry monocrop on our land wasn’t well maintained and so one of the first things we did was cut the whole thing forest to make way for the new houses.Once Lionel the chainsaw man had flattened the forest for free and sliced the wood up into half meter lengths to sell to bakers, we brought in a bulldozer to dig out the roots...and then another one to cut a trench around the perimeter and bury them.We pondered the standing water in winters, tested the soil, checked the profile and realised we had about 40cm of nutrient-starved soil atop a thick layer of solid clay.It was such a hard layer that the pine trees which had managed to find enough light to compete with the eucalyptus had roots growing sideways rather than down – which is why they toppled over in the winter winds.It was established early on that we would have to break that clay crust to give the grapes a good chance to grow down and tap into the water which would be retained through the heat of summer in the clay.Planting a vineyard isn’t rocket science – it’s farming. Sadly, I’m neither a rocket scientist or a farmer.“Winemaking starts in the field” we were told: in our case a large flat one of about half a hectare.It’s always been my job – and my approach to this crazy new life – to gather information from all possible sides and then either write up the story or implement the findings.But sometimes gathering too much information from too many people can hamper decision making by flooding the zone, to quote a phrase.At the end of it all we had to make the big decisions: which varieties, how far apart, how would they be guided to grow, how would they be irrigated?The winemaking stuff, we have been assured, isn’t something to worry about for at least a few years.Thanks for reading Off-grid and Entertaining in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.We are hugely grateful to everyone who has advised us – and apologise here and now to Hamilton Reis, Mauro Azóia, Miguel Mimoso, Ana-Rita Bouça, Niels Ulmers, Carsten Jensen, Dorina and Luisa Lindemann...and the many others involved in the making of this movie...for either not doing what they said, or not doing it well enough.And in my defence, everyone I asked had a slightly different idea of what we should do.We leaned heavily on Hamilton – the famous Mouchão winemaker with his own wonderful Natus Vini winery – who planted not just his own vineyard recently, but also many hectares of the grapes growing in our vicinity over the past 20 years.And on speed-dial was patient Mauro – of Porta 6 fame, but also a wonderful small-production winemaker at Velvet Boutique and Artisan’s Terroir who creates our own-label wine (while we wait for our new guys to get producing).The first big decision was the grape varieties, whittled down to just three: Castelão for the red and Arinto and Alvarinho in the white.The field isn’t square and amid a confusion of measurements and drone photographs I left the geometry to ChatGPT which advised 800 grapes would be sufficient.Once we ploughed and were prepping to plant, by putting in wooden posts and stretching long lengths of wire marked with tape every 1.5m (the distance between each plant), we realised it was nearer 1,000 and so upped our Castelão order to 600, settling on 200 for each of the two whites.The delivery of one thousand grape vines was much more straightforward than I expected.It was a lot easier than receiving the 25 tonnes of compost in a 16m truck, finding a bulldozer with a big enough “ripper” to cut deep through the clay, and much easier than planting 1,000 vines.Like many of the busy delivery people who buzz up and down this coast the woman delivering Plansel’s plants wanted to meet at the local petrol station rather than venturing into our valley.You can listen to the story of how our grape vines were grafted in the third episode of our podcast series Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure, in all the usual podcast places or here:I’ll be going into a lot more detail about creating our vineyard on The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure blog, so do sign up if you’re interested.I didn’t even need to hitch up the trailer – they came tightly packed and chilled in five small boxes.Of course that was the last part of the puzzle. First of all our local cow king farmer António “O Rei das Vacas” Oliveira, and his fabulously helpful son Gonçalo had to plough, distribute the organic material and plough again...all amid a much-changing weather forecast.Once the ripper did it’s work cutting through the clay in a day it was over to us, to Krishna and José, and with friends and guests Andrew Major and Howard Fenwick, Joanna Hutchins and Paul McGibney.It all took a lot longer than we expected.The grapes languished in bathtubs with their roots under water until we were ready for each bundle of them and five days after arriving all the plants were in.Rather than providing the vines with the usual wire trellis, we favoured “Bushvine” as they call it in South Africa – each plant clinging to its own bamboo stick and growing individually into a little bush.Local irrigation expert and general good-egg Cristiano taught us how best to run the water pipes and gave me a shopping list which he and his brother turned into a working irrigation system in a couple of hours.Automation will come soon, but for now the grapes have been given a good soaking – forcing the air bubbles away from the roots which everyone tells us is important.Now we wait. We hold our nerve and don’t give them too much water so they learn to grow deep roots down through the clay. Let’s hope the plants wake up soon and like their new home.* If you want to escape into the country, get away from it all and check out our new vineyard, next weekend is a great time to visit Odemira – the April 25th celebrations commemorating Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution are a thing to behold. Come and see us!* And it’s your last chance to sign up for the Wine Retreat which we’re running with the Hutchins Wine Academy Thursday 7th May - Monday 11th May. We have just two places left. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alastairleithead.substack.com