Dave Greenlee Tucker's Walk Vineyard

Tyler Bertsch: How did you first get into growing grapes?

Dave Greenlee: My wife and a friend, one of her friends, about the year 2000, 2001, went up to the University of Minnesota. I think they did—they had been thinking about, after retirement, we could be raising shrimp or anyway, they went to the University of Minnesota and they went to the Horticultural Research Center. They got to meet Elmer Swenson and he had little bags of his grapes for everybody to taste them. I never got a chance to meet Elmer, but my wife met him and he was real—he had a bag of Swenson Reds, which were pretty much table grapes. Most people don’t make wine out of them, but they’ve got a strawberry note. Anyway, she just really picked up on the whole excitement of the cold hardy grapes and Elmer’s enthusiasm for it all. So that’s how it started. She brought three plants back and they all survived and thrived and that’s how it started.

Tyler Bertsch: What plants were they, or what varieties were they?

Dave Greenlee: I’m pretty sure it was the Swenson Reds. There might have been a Somerset Seedless. At that time, there was no such thing as Marquette. So let’s see, what was the third one? I’m not sure what the third plant was. It might have been an Edelweiss, but that one didn’t survive.

Tyler Bertsch: So when did you plant your first commercial plantings, like more than a few plants? And what was the first variety?

Dave Greenlee: We planted Marquette and Brianna and La Crescent on an acre. That was in 2007. No, 2007, I’m sorry.

Tyler Bertsch: Are all those still around?

Dave Greenlee: Oh yeah. That block is one of the main—we planted about an acre a year for several years. We’ve got almost six acres.

Tyler Bertsch: Of those three varieties, did any of them, over the course of 20 years, did you lose any significant amount or lose some of them here and there? Which varieties were those?

Dave Greenlee: The Brianna were the best surviving, then Marquette, and then La Crescent. Actually, La Crescent never really died, it just died back from year to year. So it’s each year it comes back pretty strong, but a lot of times it will die all the way back to the ground.

Tyler Bertsch: On your Marquette, if you had to guess roughly, what percentage do you think died over the years in that 20 years?

Dave Greenlee: The first 10 years were really great. And then after that, we had some trunk disease. Probably on the order of 25% to 35% survived. The rest of them, again, they don’t die as much as—well, some of them die—but most of them just die back and then you can retrain them.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you think that was due more to disease or do you think cold hardiness? What do you think caused that?

Dave Greenlee: It’s not cold hardiness, but it could be something like trunk disease. It also could be—I mean I’ve been to clinics on fungal diseases and stuff that—

Tyler Bertsch: Like it could have been Eutypa dieback or something like that.

Yeah, got you. It’s kind of hard to know which trunk disease it is because there’s a handful that are pretty prevalent in our region. Eutypa is one of the big ones. Some of the early stem disease that we saw, people attributed that to a frost that they’d have a crack or something in the frost and get in there. And so it would be like a mechanical damage rather than a fungal disease. Did you ever notice splitting on Marquette trunks?

Dave Greenlee: Yes. That’s what they sometimes look like.

Tyler Bertsch: Because that aligns with what other growers have said in Nebraska.. So that doesn’t surprise me. The La Crescent, is that—do you think that was due to the cold hardiness?

Dave Greenlee: A combination of that and the fact that we planted on the side of a south-facing slope and the La Crescents were the furthest down hill, which means if we did get frost, they were more affected than the ones that were up the hill.

Tyler Bertsch: What percentage of those do you think made it 20 years?

Dave Greenlee: Oh, they’re all still there. They just get retrained. It’s just like from year to year. Almost every other year they die back. But now, some of them come back and they’re so tenacious that when they come back, if you don’t train them up, they’ll just turn into a giant bush, a jungle.

Tyler Bertsch: At North Dakota State University, I just had an interview with Harlene Hatterman-Valenti and she is a professor up there and La Crescent, out of I think it was 20 or 30 different varieties, is the best for shooting up a new trunk. It’s the fastest one to get back to the wire, and be productive again.

Dave Greenlee: Yep. And the same thing that makes them shoot back fast also makes them die back fast. I think both things can be true.

Tyler Bertsch: Yeah, and if they get long bull canes or really long canes really fast, they seem to have a lot of ghost buds or just empty spots along the spurs. I’ve noticed that too. What did you—so you started with those three and then walk me through your next few years of what else you planted in and kind of roughly when you planted it.

Dave Greenlee: 2007 and 2008 was about the same: Brianna and La Crescent and Marquette, but no La Crescent. In 2009 was Frontenac Gris. That’s been a survivor. That’s one of our best from the grape growing part. It’s also more challenging for making wine. Then 2010 was St. Croix. 2011 we planted St. Pepin. Two rows of St. Pepin, one row of Marquette, two rows of St. Pepin, one row of Marquette because, I don’t know if you know St. Pepin, but it’s a pistillate, so it’s female. It needs to have something next to it that’s got the opposite sex to get pollinated.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you stay with that configuration? Did that work for you to get pollination?

Dave Greenlee: Yeah, it worked. St. Croix is not the best. We have it at the flat part of our vineyard up on top of the hill in the north-south rows.

Tyler Bertsch: You mean the St. Pepin or the St. Croix?

Dave Greenlee: St. Croix, I’m sorry. St. Pepin is what I meant.

Tyler Bertsch: So the Marquette did work to help pollinate it? You don’t feel like you had pollination issues by doing that?

Dave Greenlee: No, I don’t think we had pollination issues, not really. What I was saying is St. Pepin was not very vigorous. It had grapes, but the clusters looked like they were full, the ones that were there, but it didn’t have a lot of clusters and it didn’t grow very fast either. It didn’t establish very fast. And the reason that we took our risk with St. Pepin was because Wollersheim’s had a late harvest, almost—well, the Canadians would call it an ice wine, but it was a dessert wine that they made from St. Pepin and it was absolutely—well, they paid like $47 a half bottle. So you know that it was good. Very tasty.

Tyler Bertsch: I’ve heard a lot of growers in different states say that’s one of the best tasting wines for sure.

Dave Greenlee: Yeah. That’s right. In fact, we had some St. Pepin that we grew early on and they really weren’t very happy with it. We had just a few cases of it and we just sort of stuck it away and didn’t sell it or put a label on it. Then a couple years later, we were actually picking and people wanted to try it. So we broke out all those cases and it was the tastiest thing ever. It was the best. And so after that it was like, don’t give up on St. Pepin, it gets better.

Tyler Bertsch: So 2011 you do St. Pepin. What do you do in 2012 and onward? Did you plant any more?

Dave Greenlee: 2012 was the last year we planted and that was Frontenac Gris.

Tyler Bertsch: You added more to the '09?

Dave Greenlee: Yeah, we had five rows of it and planted another 24 rows of it up on top.

Tyler Bertsch: So today you still have Marquette, La Crescent, Brianna, Frontenac Gris, St. Pepin, and St. Croix?

Dave Greenlee: Yeah, we haven’t replanted anything. We’ve replaced a lot of it, but we’ve never really pulled stuff out and started over. We also had, when we first planted in 2002 and 2003 before we planted the first acre, we had what we call the Block A, which was the original. That had a little bit of this and a little bit of that. By the time we finished, we had a little bit of Frontenac Blanc, we had some St. Croix, and Frontenac—not Frontenac Gris but Frontenac—and some La Crescent. And then—let’s see, what was the last... not Leon Millot... Marechal Foch? No, not Marechal Foch. It’s a real dark black, real dark grape. Sabrevois.

Tyler Bertsch: Oh yeah.

Dave Greenlee: We just had like 20 plants of Sabrevois, two rows.

Tyler Bertsch: So, we talked about Marquette, La Crescent, and Brianna survival. What percentage of the Frontenac Gris do you think still made it from when you first planted it?

Dave Greenlee: Virtually all of it.

Tyler Bertsch: What about St. Pepin?

Dave Greenlee: St. Pepin, probably half of it. St. Pepin, we were busy with the rest of the grapes and we didn’t get it pruned very well. And so it really never got established very well. I would say the first five years it just kind of was waiting for somebody to care about it. And then we got it trained up, it was good for three or four years and then it’s gradually declined.

Tyler Bertsch: What about the St. Croix?

Dave Greenlee: St. Croix, we got hit with 2,4-D. And it took—it upset it. Probably we’ve only got like 20% of what was out there.

Tyler Bertsch: Would you say of all those varieties, that did the worst then with the 2,4-D?

Dave Greenlee: Yeah, with the 2,4-D yeah, St. Croix for sure. But anyway, St. Croix was the first in line to get it, so it probably got it worst.

Tyler Bertsch: What was your land before you guys planted the vineyard?

Dave Greenlee: Corn and soybeans. But it had a south-facing slope to it and had a couple of terraces in it that we turned into—we actually had a grader come in and knock the tops of the terraces off so that it would be more like a trail. We didn’t plant there, but we have the trails between the blocks. Riding trails for the horses.

Tyler Bertsch: What kind of soil do you have?

Dave Greenlee: It varies a little bit. I would call it Prairie Loess. Not the Loess Hills down in Nebraska, what we’ve got is Prairie Loess.

Tyler Bertsch: Is that silty? Like really silty?

Dave Greenlee: No, I would say it’s actually pretty good. From an agricultural standpoint, it’s pretty good soil, better than the grapes need. It’s got some clay, it’s got some sand, and then a lot of organic material from years of taking good care of it that’s been farmed before me. Anyway, the actual soil types, we had a soil types friend of mine who is a soil scientist and we took I believe 200 samples in one acre. From the USDA standpoint, it was called Crofton and Moody. There’s one better soil than Moody, even better, and that’s called Trent soil. And the Crofton also had a worse soil called Nora. Of the 200 samples, we had all four types. From the standpoint of the NRCS, it was mapped as two of those. So it probably was a pretty good indication that they had done a good job mapping it because they picked two of the major soils that were represented there and we just happened to find smaller inclusions of the other, a little bit better soil and a little bit worse soil.

Tyler Bertsch: So between sand, clay, silt, what do you think percentage-wise? Is it lean more clay, silt, or sand? Is it kind of loamy?

Dave Greenlee: I would say of all those things you just said, it’s more loamy.

Tyler Bertsch: Is it overly fertile then for a lot of these?

Dave Greenlee: Yeah, in fact, this is an expression my dad used to say: "God didn’t make better soil than we got here, it’s just that we have a short growing season." And what I—my addendum to that would be the grapes like to grow but so do the weeds and the grass. Anything wants to grow out there.

Tyler Bertsch: We’ll talk about herbicides or weed management later, but have you had issues with any of these varieties being more vigorous than what they are on your peers? Like if you talked to other grape growers around these states, do you feel like yours are kind of in line or do you think they’re like maybe a little too vigorous and have you had overwintering issues because of it?

Dave Greenlee: I know people that say that if they used a Vertical Shoot Positioning trellising system, other people have used like a Geneva Double Curtain and stuff that because it was so vigorous that they couldn’t—they have to prune the heck out of it every year. I think we found the first few years anyway, we had to prune a lot because it was probably more vigorous than the trellising system wanted it to be. And so I would say it was—well, and I also know people not too far away that experiment with foliar fertilizers and stuff. I never leaned that way because we weren’t really going for tonnage. We wanted good quality grapes. And so we erred on the side of pruning a lot and having fewer but better grapes.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you just kind of let them—I’m sure they’re vigorous in the first few years—did you just kind of not fertilize it and let it mellow out a little bit? Is that what you did?

Dave Greenlee: Right. In recent years, we would let the horses go out there in the fall and they could walk—as long as they knew where the wires were, they just would go out there and add some fertilizer to it. But they don’t eat the grapes or the vines like the deer would. We have our area, our vineyard is fenced in with 8-foot tall high-tensile woven wire. So it’s got a deer fence that we absolutely don’t have any deer problems. They can’t jump that 8-foot tall fence. A lot of people came up to see our vineyard because it was 13 acres of well-fenced-in area. It cost like $14,000 to fence it. It was quite a project.

Tyler Bertsch: That’s a lot of acres for a South Dakota vineyard.

Dave Greenlee: Well, it is. We weren’t trying to go big as much as we were just going to try to have a vineyard that had enough that we could grow our own grapes, not have to buy juice or grapes from anybody else and have a sustainable vineyard and winery.

Tyler Bertsch: Is your trellising all VSP for all of them or do you have different?

Dave Greenlee: All VSP, yep. I did experiment a little bit with some high wire but it never—we never really were very happy with it.

Tyler Bertsch: What made you decide to do VSP over high wire?

Dave Greenlee: I think high wire got to be popular later. It was kind of like in vogue. And when we started, VSP was Paul Domoto at Iowa and Paul Read to some extent. That was kind of like the system that worked the best. We have a wire at 4 feet and another wire at 6 feet.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you feel like there are, out of these varieties, some that kind of fight you on it? Or some that take to it better or they all about the same?

Dave Greenlee: Brianna tends to want to be sort of what they call umbellate, kind of get up there and then hang. And then Marquette on the other hand, it kind of wants to go vertical. So as long as there’s somebody that trains them up, it actually wants to go vertical. And so we put a lot of tape on it, plastic tape, to kind of train things up. In the early years at least, the Marquette almost needed to be—probably should have been topped, pruned on the top to control the vigor. During the growing season is what you're talking about, right? Canopy management.

Tyler Bertsch: So with that canopy management, if you had to rank these six, which is the most frustrating, which is the easiest?

Dave Greenlee: St. Pepin was never vigorous enough to be a problem. Just to get it trained up to the first wire would be a good thing for that. I would say Marquette was always our crown jewel for us. But I think Marquette might have been the most challenging as far as the canopy because it either wanted to turn into a bush or go vertical and either way it was just—we never did anything like stripping leaves away from the bunches. But that would be one that we’d want to do if you had the time to do it.

Tyler Bertsch: You’re talking about leaf stripping? Where you try to open it up a little bit so that the grapes can mature better?

Dave Greenlee: Yeah. One person I trust said that if there’s 10 leaves past the bunch of grapes, that’s all it needs to get the food that it needs. So after that it’s just growing stuff that you’re just going to be pruning off the next year.

Tyler Bertsch: Was your Marquette more bushy than your Brianna and your Frontenac even?

Dave Greenlee: Yes. Brianna tended to go long, it would have water shoots. It would die on the trunk and but the ends would still be vigorous. So it tended to kind of keep going out more. One lady down in Yankton, Muriel Stacks, she said they’re incestuous, they keep wanting to grow together. So anyway, that was her take on what Brianna pruning was like.

Tyler Bertsch: Well, I’ve noticed a trend and I’d like to hear your thoughts on it, but it seems like Marquette grown on loamy soil seems to have killing problems where it has trunk splitting because it’s like overly vigorous. Do you think that’s true maybe? Because I’ve noticed a trend where it seems like growers on clay soils, they don’t have that problem.

Dave Greenlee: You know what? Since I only have one kind of soil, I think I believe what you say. Somebody may grow really good Marquette, and we did for a while. But after 10 years or so, it just seemed like it was dying back and I was thinking, "have I gotten this fungus in there that’s killing me from year to year?" But the Marquette just didn’t—wasn’t sustaining its growth. It kept wanting to die back. So I think I would agree with that. We certainly do have loamy soils.

Tyler Bertsch: So you would say Marquette is the most vigorous, then the Brianna, then the Frontenac Gris?

Dave Greenlee: No, I think Frontenac Gris probably might be a close second to the Marquette. Brianna would be behind that. Frontenac Gris is pretty—but Frontenac Gris also is more hardy. It just seems to be tougher.

Tyler Bertsch: It’s the hardiest of all the varieties that I’ve found besides Valiant. What about La Crescent? How about that for canopy? Because in Nebraska it’s a giant bush.

Dave Greenlee: Well, that’s kind of what it is here, but from year to year, the bush dies back and then the next year you have the bush again.

Tyler Bertsch: What about your St. Croix? How many years did you have that before you got sprayed out of it?

Dave Greenlee: About four, maybe five.

Tyler Bertsch: So it didn’t really get totally established?

Dave Greenlee: No, it got pretty well established. We had some pretty good St. Croix, some good wine. What I learned about it was it’s never going to get above 20 Brix. You wait for it to get more sugar in it, it’s just not going to happen. And so if you don’t pick it when it’s early, 17 or 18 Brix, you’re going to end up with a lot of purple hands and lugs that are dripping. They’re softer grapes and they’re big juicy grapes. So you had to get them up there and through the crusher before the flies got them.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you have a uniform pruning? Do you do spur pruning, cane renewal? How do you do that? And how many spurs on each side of the cordon do you have?

Dave Greenlee: We went for—we tried to get like 15 to 20 on each side of the cordon, 15 to 20 buds. But it got to the point where you don’t need to count each one, you just kind of look at it and you say, "this plant looks like it can support a few more and this one a little few less," and so you make adjustments. But 15 or 20 would be—15 to 30 would be a good number on each cordon.

Tyler Bertsch: So when you say buds, you don’t—how many spurs? I guess two buds per spur or three buds per spur or kind of you eyeball it depending on the variety?

Dave Greenlee: We don’t really count spurs. You just look at the spurs being about 4 inches or like a one hand width apart. And so I don’t count the spurs as much as I count the buds on the spurs. Somewhere I say 15 to 20, I mean there could be six or eight spurs and 20 or 25 buds. Two or three or four sometimes two or three or four buds per spur.

Tyler Bertsch: How do you recognize winter kill? What are some things you look for? Do you recognize any patterns with that in dry years, wet years, anything there?

Dave Greenlee: No, we actually had a weather station. I didn’t do the study, but we had a weather station that a guy from Brookings had put in. He was keeping track—they calculated growing degree days and then they also counted when we had the coldest days of the year. I think they were trying to figure out if we had a really cold snap in December, for example, that’s a lot worse than a cold snap in February because it’s has more time to harden off. Anne Fennell did a research project where she tried to figure out if we had satisfied the number of days of dormancy. So that if you took cuttings, for example, you want to wait until it had satisfied that dormant time so that the cuttings would be viable. Do you follow me?

Tyler Bertsch: Yep, it’s like a bank, like a sun bank. I read one of her research papers on that and I thought that was really interesting. I think Iowa State had did some research on that too.

Dave Greenlee: One time I remember Anne called me and said, "If you want to take cuttings off your St. Croix or whatever for next year, you can go ahead and do it now because it’s satisfied the dormant time." There is another name for that, endodormancy and ecodormancy I think it’s what it’s called. I might have them mixed up but I get what you’re saying.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you notice any difference in fruit quality as these vines aged on any of the varieties?

Dave Greenlee: No, I guess I read that if you’re growing them commercially that people don’t want to make wine from stuff that’s like less than 10 years old. But that wasn’t really what we found. What we found is that the third, fourth, fifth years were probably the best years for our grapes as far as quality and quantity, especially quantity. And so that was when we had—we probably had some of the best wines, I think. Although maybe there might have been a little bit of more challenge with early years with acid. But I didn’t find—mostly I found a difference in the quantity over the years. We pinched off the buds the first three years even though they wanted to grow grapes and we wanted to have grapes but we pinched them off so that it would work on the roots. So the fourth year was kind of the first year for us and that was a big deal for us Marquette-wise.

Tyler Bertsch: Of those six varieties, did any of them shoot up pretty fast? Like they established a trunk quicker than the other ones? Or they all kind of the same?

Dave Greenlee: I would say for the first three years, Brianna and Marquette and Frontenac Gris all made great progress. We used vine shelters. And then we took the vine—they were blue and we took the blue tubes off in August.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you ever do some without and see the difference?

Dave Greenlee: No, really we didn’t. Although the conventional wisdom when we were planting was that the first year, no matter what you do, it’s going to die back and so you’re going to start over again the second year. And that wasn’t really our experience. We had when they came out of the vine shelter up to the top wire, a lot of those did that the first year. So we had plants that were vigorous enough to survive the first winter.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you notice any kind of winter hardiness difference based upon the age of the vine, meaning maybe older vines can deal with the cold a little better than the younger ones or anything or vice-versa?

Dave Greenlee: No, I don’t think so. I mean obviously when there’s a big stalk, you end up having to saw it off a lot of times, but the roots are still—it will sucker out to beat the band. And so you just have to pick the leaders and prune them up. So no, I don’t think I noticed anything. We didn’t really have much trouble with winter kill. I would just say we had more trouble with dieback.

Tyler Bertsch: Was there anything you did over the years that you feel like helped the quality or the survival of these vines?

Dave Greenlee: No, I think I would—this is my wife’s words. She said when we’re pruning, you got to be ruthless. Just really prune the heck out of them. And then later I read something that said pruning actually leaves a wound and that’s where the fungus can get in. And so some people tried cleaning the clippers every plant. But mostly I think our plants seemed to be happiest when we pruned them a lot in March and sometimes into April. And so then they would be more vigorous in the way they’d react to the pruning.

Tyler Bertsch: How many pounds per plant do you think on these varieties you get? Or how many tons per acre?

Dave Greenlee: I think the maximum that we got was with Marquette and that was like the fifth year and that was in a half acre. I think we got like two tons per half acre, so four tons an acre. Frontenac Gris and Brianna were they somewhere around there too? Yeah, well Frontenac Gris, yeah. I would actually think they both were, even though Brianna get up to a ton faster because they’re big plump grapes. But there weren’t as many. Marquette are smaller. So I would say Frontenac Gris and Brianna probably were about the same kind of productivity I guess. Maybe two to five tons per acre.

Tyler Bertsch: Let’s talk about wind. Early spring shoots, do they break off easy or do they get tangled easier?

Dave Greenlee: No, we had a windstorm that rearranged things, but our trellis system is pretty sturdy. So the trellises all were good, but the plants got split over on one year. But that was just one year out of 20. We use wood posts and they’re put in with the post pounder and so they’re all set pretty good. And then they’re triple pressure treated posts, so they’re very high quality posts. And the end posts are 10 footers and they’re 6-inch posts and the other ones are 4-inch posts.

Tyler Bertsch: And they’re still good after 20 years?

Dave Greenlee: Oh yeah. Well, the horses for a while were knocking some of the end posts over or make them lean over. But that’s the only—and I put in number 12 high-tensile wire with springs on the ends and ratchets so you can keep them tight. We never really had to do much of that because the springs will usually keep everything nice and tight. So yeah, the trellising system we used was, I think Paul Domoto was the one who described it and also calculated how much it would cost.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you run horses in there during spring?

Dave Greenlee: Just in the winter. So late fall and winter then we’ll bring them back out again before spring. Before the shoots start coming.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you notice the difference with that, like vine vigor? Like maybe the manure helps?

Dave Greenlee: It probably doesn’t hurt, but the grass we have out there is buffalo grass. We planted buffalo grass so that we wouldn’t have to mow so often and also so that it wouldn’t be wouldn’t compete with the vines as much rather than growing brome grass or something. We got someone to come out here from the county. They planted—it was actually buffalo grass, blue grama and side-oats, but those were the nurse crops. Buffalo grass is really what we planted.

Tyler Bertsch: With the wind, do you notice any kind of delays on the outside rows of the vineyard from the cold wind that hits it?

Dave Greenlee: No, I don’t think we have anything like that.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you have any issues with berry splitting on any of these varieties?

Dave Greenlee: Not really. We’ve had rains of like 4 or 5 inches at times. veraison is like the first week in August for many of our grapes. And then we’re usually starting picking like the end of August until the end of September. Sometimes into October if we’ve got a good Frontenac Gris crop, we’ll try to take it into late harvest and wait until we get a hard frost.

Tyler Bertsch: What about drought?

Dave Greenlee: No, and in fact I somebody gave me a an irrigation system, a Toro, it’s a drip irrigation system. We had that for the first year and we thought maybe we’d just use it to get established. And so I had one block with irrigated and another the next block was not and I never even tried to roll out the irrigation system after that. There is what they say is you unless you do a good job of irrigating, like irrigate very, very thoroughly and not very often, the root system can become real shallow if you have regular irrigation. And so we didn’t want to do that. And then we also found that the plants, we put three gallons of water on them when we plant them and then after that they we had timely rains there almost every year I think. Northeast of Sioux Falls, almost to Minnesota. We usually get 20 or 30 inches of rain.

Tyler Bertsch: All right, so herbicide drift. How do you mitigate that?

Dave Greenlee: Talk to your neighbors. Let them know what you’re trying to do and maybe even scare them a little bit. Tell them it’s one thing if you spray 2,4-D and it takes out grandma’s tomatoes, but if you take out my grapes, that’s a perennial. That’s like you’re setting me back, you’re putting me out of business. And so I got insurance and my insurance company has got lawyers. And so when I file a claim, you’re probably going to get taken to court. That would be the as nastiest thing that I would that I could tell my neighbors. Just be up front with them before they—and as a result of that, I even had a neighbor call one time and say, "I want to spray Roundup and the wind is to the north and I want to only plant the one that’s on the south side." Anyway, he was being very careful to avoid my crops. And he was spraying Roundup, which doesn’t drift anyway, it’s just overspray that you worry about.

Tyler Bertsch: Is there a specific insurance you use?

Dave Greenlee: We thought we had insurance that would cover us and then after a while they said, "Well, no, it really doesn’t cover that." Anyway, everybody I talked to said the insurance companies, they don’t offer anything for grapes because we’re a new thing.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you ever have any winters that were like really, really, really cold and you thought, "Oh, I’m going to lose them," and they ended up being okay?

Dave Greenlee: We had some 40 belows which early on we haven’t had anything like that for a while. But I really didn’t ever have winter kill that you’d be identified that you’d say was the plants were not hardy enough. These varieties we have are cold hardy. We lost our Edelweiss and we actually grew some Traminette for a while just to see if it would grow. It wasn’t going to make it either. I tried Traminette because somebody told me that Gewürztraminer—Traminer and Gewürztraminer, they’re relatives. It’s like Marquette is to Pinot Noir.

Tyler Bertsch: Have you had years where you’ve gotten spring frost and then had secondary buds shoot out?

Dave Greenlee: Yeah, we have. I learned about primary, secondary, and tertiary buds. If you get an early frost and you lose your primary buds, you’ll still get about a 50% crop. But if you lose the secondary buds and the primary buds, you’ll still get about 10% on these tertiary buds. But another thing that I learned was don’t be in a real hurry to go out there and prune because if you do have a frost and there’s a dieback, you have a chance to kind of make adjustments after that early frost. Also, it tends to die at the end, so if you’ve already cut the end off, then it’s going to die off the new end. So that’s why we weren’t in a hurry to be out there in March trying to prune. Other people have said they’ll go out there as soon as it’s—the weather is not miserable and sometimes in March you have a few good days where you can go out there. It’s fully dormant then.

Tyler Bertsch: What about disease issues?

Dave Greenlee: We had early on we had some problems with downy mildew and we sprayed for it. But then after a while, it just didn’t seem like we had anything. No, never had botrytis, never had any problems with that or black rot. Our vineyard, probably our claim to fame is the rows are 10 feet apart and the plants are 8 feet apart. So they’re pretty roomy.

Tyler Bertsch: So do you have a spray schedule or you just kind of spray as needed?

Dave Greenlee: Well, that’s the trouble, I guess, is if you got—we had phylloxera. Foliar phylloxera. The trouble with that is by the time you start to see it, you should have sprayed two weeks ago. So we tried to map it when we had problems and then next year we’ll try to head it off before it starts, but we just tolerated the fact that we lost some—the leaves looked like hell but it didn’t really affect the crop much. Frontenac Gris and Marquette had more phylloxera than—I don’t think Brianna had very much. Sometimes in the first few years, somebody told me that they thought it was kind of nice to have a little bit of phylloxera going because then you didn’t have to go out there and strip leaves and stuff. It would actually improve the crop a little bit by having the leaves die back.

Tyler Bertsch: What do you spray for foliar phylloxera?

Dave Greenlee: I’m not sure if I could tell you. Not Mustang. I’m not sure what we sprayed. We had to order it. We had a big seed company over here and they had to order some of it. It was—was it Assail? No.

Tyler Bertsch: You’ll have to let me know what it is. All right, no other diseases. What about fertilizer?

Dave Greenlee: No, not at all. We did petiole analysis for a couple years. The first year we did it because we were told that if we did soil analysis they would tell you about, well, you’re going to plant corn or soybeans, but it won’t tell you anything about grapes. Petiole analysis, on the other hand, would tell you what the plant is taking up. It’s not just what’s in the soil, but what is available to it. And so that was useful, but I honestly didn’t know much about what I was looking at until I took it up to Anne Fennell and she was more well-versed in reading those surveys.

Tyler Bertsch: What’s your soil pH roughly?

Dave Greenlee: Oh, it’s all over the board, but it tends to be pretty not acidic, but very basic into the 6s to 8s. We were in the range for soil pH and so I was assured that whatever we wanted to grow would like the soil.

Tyler Bertsch: What about aphids, Japanese Beetle, Asian Lady Beetle?

Dave Greenlee: Asian Lady Beetles depend on when they pick the soybeans. Because if they pick the soybeans and then we try to pick grapes, we could have a big problem. After the aphids are gone and the Asian Lady Beetles are still hanging out looking for stuff, they’ll start looking for grapes. No Japanese Beetles. I don’t know that we ever had any.

Tyler Bertsch: What about weed control?

Dave Greenlee: In the rows, I used Roundup or glyphosate. Probably twice in the summer. I just take a wand out there, but I learned how—I got a high quality wand and then usually I’d sucker them mechanically. Before I spray. And then when I spray, once in a while I hit a leaf and I just stop. I go get down off the tractor and pull the leaves off. I just use a clipper for the suckers. Fiskars number 10, those red-handled jobbers.

Tyler Bertsch: What about wasps?

Dave Greenlee: My wife and I learned to look in the grow tubes before we pulled them off. Once you get done, you really don’t want to mess with grow tubes anymore. I had that too. Oh man, I had that two years ago. I got a whole bunch of them swarmed me. It wasn’t fun. Did those wasps favor any of the varieties?

Dave Greenlee: I would say they liked the Brianna.

Tyler Bertsch: Bird management?

Dave Greenlee: I already have netting. I have about five miles of netting. It was like a three or four-week job. These high school kids got their college paid for by draping the net. I’ve got a device made by an outfit called Vintra and it’s just a like a little platform and it’s on wheels. It has an arm that sticks out and then it has a hoop on the end. And so we would put the big bag of netting, like a half mile of netting on a platform and then feed it out, one person on each side and a person driving the tractor. The netting is 14 feet wide. I think the trade name on it is Bare Hands netting because it’s woven. It’s effective, but it’s really only effective if you not only drape it, but you come back and clip it at the bottom. And clipping takes forever. That’s where the high school kids got rich.

Tyler Bertsch: When you did have the nets, did you use anything else?

Dave Greenlee: No, I never tried sound systems and propane cannons. Ray Winter had propane cannons and bird calls and all kinds of stuff because he had many more acres than he could afford to put netting on. And I said, "well, do the birds get used to this stuff?" And he said, "yeah, takes about two or three days." Like it does keep them away but not forever.

Tyler Bertsch: How many plants did you have roughly?

Dave Greenlee: That was probably about 1,000, I would say. Decent amount but they were three to four years old if I remember right, so they just didn’t have like a huge harvest. What about raccoons?

Dave Greenlee: Trapped. Ours is pretty open, we don’t have a lot of trees around the vineyard anyway. Inside the 13 acres there’s no trees, just vines.

Tyler Bertsch: Brix levels and birds?

Dave Greenlee: Veraison means the birds are going to start testing. And about the time when the Brix gets to be in the teens, the birds will be after it and by the time it’s getting close to harvest, you don’t even have to test the sugar, you just see the bird damage.

Tyler Bertsch: How did you handle harvest?

Dave Greenlee: Friends and neighbors and church groups. Probably the best one I love to talk about is the Augustana University wrestling team. It turned out that the timing for them was they can’t start practicing with wrestling until October. But they’re in school in September. And so the team, All-Americans and rookies and first-year people, would come out and they were already a team and they would pick grapes together. I made a donation so they got more money to buy food.

Tyler Bertsch: Mistake you thought you made early on?

Dave Greenlee: Well, you know, it’s a process. If you look at how much work there is to do, like pruning, you never get it done. It’s not a destination. And the observation I would make is I’m out there one day and all of a sudden I look at how many rows there are to do and I’m thinking, "oh, this is awful." Then I look at how much I’ve done and that makes me feel a little bit better. And then I realize there’s birds out there and there’s quiet and I can’t think of any place I’d rather be than right here. It’s so discouraging when you think about how long of a work day it is and then you realize that it’s fun, it’s a good place to be. I didn’t make one mistake but I know a guy who did and that is they changed to a trellising system that was closer to the ground and he said he ran off all his friends because they didn’t want to bend over. And so my wire at 4 feet means that almost everything happens 4 feet and above.

Tyler Bertsch: What are you most proud of?

Dave Greenlee: We made some quality wine. Many times I’ve heard people say, "I really wasn’t wild about coming out here to try cold hardy grapes, but it seemed like a good outing." Turns out the wine is good. Making quality wine that people liked, that was the thing.

Tyler Bertsch: All right, well I have no more questions. Thanks for your time!

Dave Greenlee: No problem. I enjoyed the conversation.