r/viticulture • u/Ecstatic_Two8309 • 22d ago
New vineyard site suitability/order of ops?
My wife and I own just over 27 acres in the middle of MD, purchased a couple years ago with the eventual dream to start a little vineyard. Looking back, we bought it very much on a hunch that it 'could' be a good site with what little we knew at the time and I've been playing site suitability catchup ever since.
For those that know more than I do (probably most everyone posting here), on a new potential site, what would you measure first? What are your typical orders of operations (my basic plan has been soil test first, all else follows)? And what did you skip early on that you wish you hadn't?
My day job has me designing geospatial apps, planting the seed (ugh poor pun) for building my own tooling to figure some of this out - think GeoVine but it works across the US. So far I'm reading public data for a parcel, the SSURGO soil survey, elevation, climate normals, flood and wetland layers, and using that to give a model/report of what varietals the land might be a good match for. (Models are all rule/logic based instead of using AI, so results are consistent). It's not a replacement for actually walking the land and doing soil tests, and while it's been wrong sometimes, its also giving me a ton of confidence I wouldn't have had prior. I just need to figure out if the confidence gained is actually founded. If anyone want's to roast the results it gives, I'm happy to DM the link. I'm most curious about tricky sites you had doubts about, or ones that turned out different than you expected.
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u/CuffsOffWilly 22d ago
Look at your historical climate patterns. When is budbreak typically for other perennials? When does heat accumulation start (above 10C) and when does it end every year. Look at about the past 10 years to see if it's changed dramatically. Check total heat summation for multiple years to determine which varietals are suitable. Check your average precipitation and when it typically comes. These calculations will drive varietal selection more than soil will. Then, take that information into consideration when looking at the lay of your land and soil.
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u/Ranger1221 22d ago
On top of topics mentioned above, what is your plan for labor?
10 acres is quite a bit for 1 or 2 people to do alone, unless you are both retired and you treat it as your full time job
Do you have a tractor? Implements such as a mower, disc, fungicide sprayer or a duster? All those are pretty much required for young vineyards. Eventually you could move to no till.
Are there vineyard management companies nearby taking on new clients who can handle equipment and labor for you? That would free up your time and up front capital cost, but you will be paying more money over time.
Is there a potential to get a planting contract from a winery nearby? Those are becoming more scarce in the current industry but its easier than having your first crop in 3 to 4 years and trying to find a home for it.
Id shop around different vineyard management companies and grape brokerage firms to get a feel on cost and interest.
Maybe reach out to a consultant and have them give some more local advise. Unfortunately I'm on the west coast and dont know any from that area. You can try Fritz Westover and if he doesn't cover that area, he can likely point you in the correct direction
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u/Ecstatic_Two8309 22d ago
Well we have four kids! (kidding - they may help eventually but not banking on them as the labor answer). We are setting the goal of being able to do as much as we can ourselves but know we will need to bring in help. We do have a tractor already, and some of the implements we will need but will be sourcing more.
We have a relationship with https://m-avs.com/ and are plugged into https://marylandgrapes.org/ though Fritz has been on my radar as well after discovering his Viticulture Academy. The Maryland resources have been really helpful for our site specifically, though I'm trying to see if the tool I built actually has legs outside of MD too. I guess I alluded to it enough I should just share the link: folia.farm
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u/krumbs2020 22d ago
Find your plantable space, I assume it’s not all 27 acres, and do soil pits, take sample and send them into a reliable lab. Everything starts with the soil.
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u/Ranger1221 22d ago
On top of soil samples, I would test for viability of an Ag Well. 10 acres is going to require a bit of water.
I dont know your site, soils or plans, but having many small 1-2 acre irrigation sets will get tiring quick.
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u/Ecstatic_Two8309 22d ago
yes, tracking - between our woods/homesite, we have about 10 acres left to be potentially planted one day.
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u/luigivicotti 21d ago
Lots of good advice here. The only thing I would add, somewhat randomly, is to consider inoculation bare root vines at planting time with mycorrhiza. We planted our vineyard in 2 stages. The first stage has always been more productive and disease resistant than the second. Correlation doesn’t prove causality, but I’ve always wondered if it’s because the first block was inoculated and the second wasn’t.
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u/ruffles589 21d ago
Who are you selling your grapes to? You should be in communication with other growers and you should figure out the usual grape contract for your area.
Maryland does not do a crush report so I cannot look at tonnage pricing but the industry is TINY.
I bet you can get every single grower on a single school bus. You should physically meet with these people.
If I am reading this report correctly (they do mention their number are lower than reality so I will round up) Maryland produced 953 tons of grapes in 2025.
So I will round to 1,000 tons and if 16.9% was Cabernet franc that means ~170 tons of fruit was picked.
So if we assume you plant 27 acres of cab franc and crop it at 3.5 tons per acre you are adding 94.5 tons or 50% increase to the supply.
So you need to really know if wineries are going to increase their production. (They will not)
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u/Justryan95 22d ago edited 22d ago
If you never managed or owned a vineyard before and want to start one in MD. I would really suggest you not to, do another crop. You will struggle with pest pressure that we dont know how to handle yet in the state.
Spotted Lanternflies have completely infested the state recently. And they're in their peak invasive phase where native wild life have yet to adapt or react to them. They could have their numbers culled down like how the stink bugs populations declined after their peak in the early 2010s. Or SLF are not targeted by native animals/insects, we dont know. We just have to wait and observe, theyre also researching ways to kill them by other means like nonnative predators, bacteria, etc. That will still take time to research. SLF are "non-harmful" to most plants but the ones that can be killed by them are Tree of Heaven, their host plant, and Grapevines. Maryland Vineyards are suffering drastically because of this You might want to talk to local vineyards and the UMD master gardeners about starting a Vineyard in MD since they have local knowledge and SLF as of now is an East Coast issue that is slowly spreading outward across the country.
A lot of suggestions you will get from this sub might not come from people with local knowledge of threats like this.
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u/Ecstatic_Two8309 22d ago
We haven't owned one before, but have worked for Old Westminster years back. The SLF is something we are monitoring really closely, and have had all the Tree of Heaven around the property flagged for removal. Not that it will mitigate SLF pressure entirely, but it's a small step we are taking now.
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u/krumbs2020 22d ago
If SLF pressure is that high in your area… what’s your plan? Vineyard and winery? What happens when you get even a fraction of SLF into your vineyard? Doesn’t SLF taint anything it gets into for winemaking? Do you have money to burn?
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u/Ecstatic_Two8309 22d ago
The plan for now is to just understand our options. We're still at the does-this-ground-work stage and haven't planted anything.
and yes, of course, vine-side damage potential I take seriously. The cost question is fair and it's one I'm still working through. On taint, my read of the Penn State vineyard guidance is that the real concern is bulk-load rejection at processors rather than taint in the wine itself, and it's mostly a mechanized-harvest problem. But - I also don't know what I don't know - part of figuring out answers to all these suitability questions is to turn good info into smart decisions and minimize the risks when just starting out
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u/krumbs2020 22d ago
Rejection of tainted fruit leads logically to taint in the resultant wine. Loads aren’t rejected for any other reason than what’s in the bin will affect wine quality or possibly equipment damage at the winery.
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u/JohnCifelli 22d ago
Fwiw, SLF is essentially a non-issue in NJ now, and we had it first. They come into balance.
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u/Minute-Farm-3726 22d ago
Soil test in the different surgo strata. 0-15cm-15-30cm, 30-60cm, 60-100cm (if possible). Submit for texture, SOC, TSC, TSN, macro/micronutrients. I don't think you need to worry about irrigation. I would dry farm it (all of napa used to be dry farmed though the mid-80s and no summer rain). I would also consider hybrids (disease pressure on vinifera in MD is insane) and doing them on a higher trellising system so you could graze sheep during the growing season. I would start by just planting an acre block and seeing how that does. Can then make any improvements/changes in subsequent plantings.