Page 55 - The Hunt - Fall 2021

The usual netting couldn’t totally stop the damage. “They’d come down in flocks, and they just wouldn’t be scared away,” he says.
The vineyard itself begins near the highway, climbs up a gentle hill, then spreads out behind the winery across the breadth of the property, which is perhaps 200 yards wide. The vines then goes back over the crest and continue
for a short distance. Vietri has portioned off the property into four parts according to soil types. He makes a wine blended from the vines growing in each section, occasionally producing an additional vintage.
The La Prima Donna is an amber-colored white wine blend of tocai, malvasia bianca, fiano, pinot grigio and petit manseng grapes grown in the stony soils that make up the southeast area of the field. Silk is a dry rosato or rosé made from the corvina veronese, barbera, nebbiolo, carmine and petit verdot grapes from the eastern slopes of the hill.
Among Va La fans, there are frequent arguments as to which is the best red
wine made at the winery: Mahogany or Cedar? The former comes from malvasia nera, barbera, sagrantino, carmine, lagrein, charbono, teroldego and petit verdot grapes grown in the black mushroom soils of the center area of the hill. Cedar, meanwhile, is a blend of nine nebbiolo clones that come from the red earth of the field’s western edge. At any one time, Vietri has dozens of different varieties and clones.
Although Vietri seldom strays from Avondale and what he calls “the little vineyard,” he has vast professional contacts around the world. When it comes to accessing a new variety or a new clone, he calls on the research experts at the fabled University
of California, Davis, who often find a new prospect in their massive list of vines kept in quarantine, waiting to be proven disease-free.
Although he’s not a certified organic farmer, Vietri tries to control weeds by mechanical methods. During the summer, he frequently dons his “space suit” and mounts a tractor to spray approved organic compounds to control mildew. It’s the bane of humid Eastern American vineyards, among other diseases of the vine. A rabid baseball fan, Vietri loves analytics. He keeps meticulous records, whether it’s the weather or when vines go through the maturation process of bud break, flowering and fruit set. For the reds, it’s veraison—or color change.
In the end, Vietri’s aim is to accurately translate into wine what the vineyard soils
and multiple vines give him. “For me, I really see it as farming,” he says late one evening
after a long, cold day of pruning. “I try to take whatever wonderful things that were in this little field that year and put it into the bottles.”
Visit valavineyards.com.
www.TheHuntMagazine.com 53