Salisbury Vineyards

AVILA VALLEY GRAPEVINE – APRIL 2008

“How Green is our Valley” and in more ways than one. The abundant winter rains, although still not at normal (but welcomed all the same) have certainly given us a lush Spring with grasses and flowers “bustin’ out all over”. We have had sufficient rain to wash out the salts and minerals from around the root zone in our vineyards that build up from irrigation water (iron, manganese, sulfide, and alkalinity in our case). The downpours, early this year, have given us a clean palette to work with this year.

The other “Green” in our valley is how local farmers are growing crops. Most growers are using sustainable or organic methods to produce farm products -especially the winegrape growers. In our case, as I have mentioned before, we have never used an insecticide (bug killer), no herbicides (weed killer) for the last 4 years, and we use an organic mineral oil for the bulk of our fungicides (powdery mildew killer). We chop our grasses in the rows and under the vines after they dry out and go to seed. This gives a straw mat in the vineyard that chokes out summer weeds. The seeds, many of which are natives, work their way into the ground and sprout early in the Fall, holding onto our soil when the rains start. And an added benefit in leaving the grasses grow even though the vineyard looks unkempt? It provides for a haven for the good bugs to over-winter, and when the grasses dry out, they move into the vines and go to work killing the bad bugs. If there was nowhere for them to propagate and survive, we would lose this natural advantage.

We are experimenting with cover crop test plots, organic mulch and fertilizers with the Central Coast Vineyard Team. The CCVT is a grass roots farmer’s organization that is researching ways to farm winegrapes sustainably and organically. We also have an organic research project in fertility being done by a Cal Poly graduate student. Our goal is to become 100% organic by the end of the year. We feel it is our obligation to offer you, the consumer, a wine that doesn’t come from a toxic waste dump.

We grow native grasses on our roads for soil erosion prevention and dust control. We also use ground asphalt from local road projects to spread on our more heavily used roads to keep down the dust. We make sure that this road base is at least a half mile away from the creeks to prevent any possible contamination. Harmful mites travel by dust so this is a natural way to keep them from being airborne and ending up in the vines. We used the clay dirt removed when we created the parking lot at the schoolhouse to build up some of our more erosion prone sandstone roads in the vineyard. We leave our gates open so animals can pass through the ranch and even have a pond that collects runoff that serves as a year-round water hole.

We also used green techniques in restoring the Santa Fe Schoolhouse, dedicated in 1907, and the Ruda House which was built on Smith Rock in San Luis Bay in the 1880s as part of the whaling station and moved off to downtown Avila in the early 1900s. We relocated it in 2003. We saved, refinished, and reattached all the molding, wainscot, doors, windows, floors, and other features that we could use on both buildings. The rainwater off of the roofs and from underground drainage pipes feed into a 1,500 gallon cistern that we reuse for irrigation water. The fencing is made up of old pressure treated wooden grape stakes, which we can’t legally burn or dispose of at a dump anymore, from an old vineyard in Paso Robles we replanted. The iron road barrier on the curve coming into the parking lot is made up from the pipe that was originally used in the old Bassi well that we replaced in the vineyard. We used the busted up concrete from the old sidewalks around the schoolhouse for the floor of the bandstand in our patio and pathways around the buildings.

We relocated all of the trees at the schoolhouse from off-site with our tree-moving truck. The Queen Palms in the parking lot and the one located in front of the Civic Assn. building, were saved from the oil cleanup project on Front Street and the other trees came from the abandoned nursery which we cleaned up and planted our Maridel Pinot Noir Vineyard. We recycle all of our wine bottles, cans, and paper goods and use recycled paper products for our bags and cartons.

This summer, we plan to make our own Bio-diesel from grape pumice and we will be growing organic produce for sale at the schoolhouse complex. A few things for you to consider as a wine consumer – how safely were the grapes grown and what is the carbon footprint to bring all that out-of-country wine all the way across the ocean to your dinner table? Makes a great case for buying local sustainably grown wine, doesn’t it! “Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance”. Benjamin Franklin.