Made Local Magazine May/Jun 2022

Rewards taste sweeter when you have to work for them. And for thousands of years, deep underground, that’s how vines have brought us grapes. From the prehistoric Levant to the Spanish missionaries who bottled the first Sonoma vintage, these plants can thrive without a single drop of irrigation. As Tony Coturri explains, during the first two years after a vine goes in, they employ a mobile watering system wheeled between the rows to help the plants get established– enough to sustain the young plants, but not so much that Valley’s first vintage, vineyards have thrived in dry climates where their roots search deep into the earth for moisture and nutrients. And it’s the very strain of that subterranean struggle that, above ground, results in rich sugars that yeast will feast upon to produce what Plato once swore was the gods’ greatest gift to humankind.