Does anyone know, if a vineyard burns, will the grapevine roots resprout, or do they have to be replanted?
Well, in that Keanu Reeves remake of an old Euro film, after the fire, all but one root-stock was dead, so they’d have to replant off that surviving root.
This is probably incomplete information, but wine grapes aren't commercially grown from seed as much as they are grafted onto root stock with whatever varietal is desired for that vineyard section. My guess is that there are already phone calls going out to vineyards in France (where California transplants saved French wineries years ago), South America, and Australia to get new rootstock and grafts. The wine will be back to 'normal' in a few seasons. Many heroic recovery stories are already being envisioned by the winery owners. Insurance companies are going to raise rates on agricultural fire insurance, and more non-wine fields will be converted or proced out of farming in California. It's hard to be a pig farmer when growing grapes is so much more profitable.
One thing I always disliked about California wines was the pricing. They charged what they thought they could get for a bottle, vice what it made sense to charge based on quality or other market factors. An otherwise twenty dollar bottle of wine would be sold for fifty or more dollars just because it was a fancy brand in the right county. Of course this is capitalism (as practiced by anticapitalists in many cases) so if they can do it, let them. I'm sure pleas for bailouts will come before the end of the year, with small farmer and non wine growers lining up far behind the politically connected and bigger grower operations.
I know from experience that grapevines must be trained from the beginning to put out two arms in a T shape. Arms are called cordons from the French. Grapes are hardy so should re sprout. But I do not know if it is better just to buy new grape plants and train them into the T shape. Or weather sprouts will do.
When you look at older grapevines they get thick like a 4" diameter tree trunk
“Fire doesn’t kill vines,” said viticulturist Daniel Roberts of Sonoma County’s Integrated Wine Growing. Fire “can burn them back, and they won’t have crop next year. But I’ve brought vineyards back after fire.”
In fact, vineyards served as highly effective fire breaks, guarding nearby buildings from blazes. That’s because “a standing vine will have a moisture content of as much as 50 percent, even in a dry year,” explained Joe Zicherman, a fire safety expert and owner of Zicherman Roemer Vineyard in Anderson Valley. For a vine to reach its fiber saturation point — where it could burn through — requires a prolonged heating period. “And wildfires move fast,” he said.
“Looking at some of the affected areas, you’ll see fire around the vineyards,” Zicherman continued, “but I don’t foresee a lot of damage to the vineyards themselves.”
http://www.sfgate.com/wine/article/Hope-in-Wine-Country-as-vineyards-assess-the-12278600.php
“Does anyone know, if a vineyard burns, will the grapevine roots resprout, or do they have to be replanted?”
My brother has a vineyard in Redwood Valley which we visited yesterday. The sheriff escorted us in and out to look at the property for about 30 minutes, otherwise the burned areas are blocked off to prevent looting and because there is danger from downed power lines, and the state has certain specific concerns as to toxics getting spread around. Don’t forget these are farms and there is diesel and other fuels in various containers of unknown status. The house on the property was 100% destroyed, I am talking the sills on the concrete perimeter foundation walls, even the boards surrounding planter areas. You see white ash and (only) small charcoaled pieces of 2x4 lumber with a small pile of nails lying on the ground. Pile of nested frying pans from the kitchen and coffee cups. Not much else.
But the *vines* in his case and in most of these cases are somewhat amazingly untouched. Including the tiny PVC tubing for irrigation. So, as you’ll discover if you read the article, if there was a fire, the buildings (and, if there is wine processing gear such as tanks and destemmers and bottling equipment) is probably destroyed. The nature of these fires was that the fires were spread by flying embers, then blowtorched via 40+ mph winds. Though they burned super hot, they burned super fast because all the fuel was consumed so quickly. Not like a forest fire where a sweeping curtain of blazing fire marched through and cooked the entire environment including under the ground for an hour or more. A neighbor said his house was fully engulfed in less than 3 minutes from the igniting ember landing on the roof. He said a 300 x 300 field (actually a cemetary) was burned in about 15 seconds. It was bizarre driving through Santa Rosa and seeing in-line (meaning freestanding, one business per building) restaurants built within shopping centers within the last ten years, eg; basically new, burned to the ground.
As to your question, probably 98% of the grapes and vines are perfectly fine. Most of the grapes are in their dormancy period now. Now, whether the fruit itself from the next harvest will produce salable wine is probably unanswerable. I myself am not an expert in this but my main point is that “vineyards” by and large did not burn. At all. In all these pictures of utterly destroyed wineries, meaning buildings, infrastructure, you will see the rows of grapes and the trellises and irrig systems largely untouched.
From the article...
‘But the vines, which take up to eight years to become productive after being planted, remain cause for concern.
‘If [the damage] goes down to the rootstock, it can take about two years for your crop to recover so you’re going to miss about two years of wine,’ Alan told DailyMail.com.
‘If it burns a good portion of the wood but still leaves some intact, you can possibly lose your next vintage.’
Grapevines today are grafted. The genetic material of the rootstock is different than the genetic material that produces the grapes. This is because the quality wine grapes cannot grow on their own roots due to phylloxera. Wine growers will select a particular cultivar of the grape from which they want to make wine and a particular cultivar of the rootstock.
In addition, there is a complex process each year of training and pruning. What you see as “grape vines” may be many years old. Each year the old vines put out new shoots out of the old wood and it’s these new shoots on which the grapes grow each year. Early in the winter, last year’s shoots are pruned back (and burned!), and new shoots grow the following year.
So if this year’s shoots get scorched probably no problem. If the old wood is damaged then it might not be dead but might not produce good grapes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylloxera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4BzrE7hn2U
Depends upon how mature the vines and how fast the fire ran over them. If the vines themselves ignited and smoldered, well, not good.
You can cut the top of the vine and reconnect it with vine branches from another vine yard if the roots are humid enough to not have died. A,l the French vine yards died of Philoxera a while back and they cut them off and put American stems on them. So, French wine is really American on top with french roots.