Planting Along the Rubicon

According to Wikipedia, Rubicon is used in slang as follows: “The phrase “crossing the Rubicon” is an idiom that means “passing a point of no return“. Its meaning comes from allusion to the crossing of the river Rubicon by Julius Caesar in early January 49 BC.”

When Alexandria and Seth Chambers announced a planting party for their new Vineyard endeavor, Rubicon Vale, I was so all in. Seth was kind enough to sit with me for an interview 5 or so years back and Alex has always made winery visits fun and shared information about the winery, the wine, and the industry. She’s also been fantastic helping with designs for the MyNovaWineBlog t-shirts :). An opportunity to help them out, take on an experience like this that I’ve never had, and just do something different, I was all in on this!

For this day the weather was mercifully cooler, (after a week of 90 degree days!), overcast and drizzly. Seth and his father had done significant prep work breaking up the soil and creating trenches for our planting efforts. Seth ordered some 2000 vines for us to plant – totaling 0.5 acres of Petit Verdot and 1 acre of Petit Manseng. Sadly my crew of four got there after all the petit verdot rows were being planted by other crews, and so we ended up planting Petit Manseng. Bear in mind, I LOVE me a good DRY petit manseng, but PV is truly my jam.

This property is high up in the Shenandoah Mountains, pretty close to the town of Mount Jackson. My car registered our parking area at 1350 feet above sea level, and from there we piled into a truck and were driven to the vineyard area uphill, I’m guessing around 1500 feet above sea level. The land had some decent slope to it for drainage. The property itself is stunning and beautiful, a total of 80 acres.

Once we got to the vineyard itself, Seth gave us a rundown of how to plant the baby vines. He walked us through the importance of great care around the bulb at the top, where the vine had been grafted. He grabbed a hoe and dug out a bit in the ground, popped the vine in, and covered the roots and much of the stem with dirt, leaving about a fistful of vine above the ground. He watched us do a few, and then set us loose.

This is hard work. At one point, especially listening to Stephen Bozzo talk about his winery, I thought it would be an amazing idea to take all my retirement savings, dump it into a site with great potential, and start my own winery. I’m one glass and a handful of ibuprofen in five hours later and I can honestly tell you that I’m ok with the path I’ve taken – this is hard work and I offer much respect to the people who plant the vines, tend them, and make our wine. I just dunno that I could do this daily!

We went to work on our row, planting Petit Manseng with a little over 4 feet of separation between vines. After each baby vine was planted, another team came by with a bamboo stake and a little cardboard rectangle that they planted put over the vine – they need to protect these babies from wildlife right now while they get the vineyard fully set up for growing. They have fencing around the site, but they also have some wildlife on site, and as they tend the site and nurture it, they’ve got to protect the fledgling vines.

In about three hours, we planted about 200 vines (four of us were working on it). It was pretty rough work all in all – one team member broke up the ground and got a hole deep enough for the vine. A second team member placed the vine and carefully scooped soil around it to bury it deep enough. A third measured the distance to get just over four feet away. The fourth carried the bucket of vines and a shovel to break up dirt too tough to split up by hand to pack around the newly planted vine. We went along like this, spending just around a minute per vine. We completed two entire rows of Petit Manseng in total.

The final result was a row of vines that looked like this:

Many had shoots of leaves coming out and others had buds that would burst open and produce shoots that would grow in the sunlight and give energy for robust growth to establish the vine in this soil.

Some of the soil was bone dry, and other parts you could see there was an underground spring feeding the area and the soil quickly turned to muck as you broke it up. I’m curious about what that means for this land and the grapes growing here? We know Petit Verdot turns off water intake when it doesn’t need any more… how will Petit Manseng manage that? What about other grapes they will plant here?

Seth came through all of the rows, looking at our work and bringing us anything we needed, especially more buckets of vines.

I heard him share some thoughts about the place with other groups, including the idea of building a future Chambers home near the vineyard site as well as cabins that could be rented through airbnb. There was a discussion of a tasting room much closer to the main road and keeping traffic further away. They do have plans for an event space here and it sounds like they want it to be something fun!

After planting was close to wrapping up, their parents had been preparing food back at our base area where we all parked – I suspect this space will become a production building or at least a space where they will house a lot of their equipment. They’ve got some solar panels ready to install on it as they don’t plan to bring power this far from the road. They had some great chili and hot dogs ready for us, with cornbread and all, and they opened a bunch of Virginia wine to relax with. Every volunteer got their amazing Rubicon Founders Crew t-shirt, which I’m excited to sport, especially once they’ve got wine available!

We thoroughly enjoyed this experience, though we know we’ll be sore tomorrow. We got to do our work with a nice couple from Manassas who were fun to talk with as we worked through the morning:

Husband will also tell you that I’m a slacker and didn’t work, but here is proof:

I guess he did his fair share too.

Have you ever planted vines? What did you think? I cannot wait to taste the wine these babies eventually make and reflect on having been a part of this at its beginning!

In a future Part II, I’ll share what I’m learning about the plans for this Vineyard in the coming years. We have a great preview of wine to come!