THE ADVOCATE 535
VOL. 80 PART 4 JULY 2022
• Old vines, having survived for decades, may be more resistant to
diseases, giving support to the Darwinian adage of “survival of the
fittest”.
But not all vines, and not all varieties, make it. Some, such as Cabernet
varieties, tend to taper off after the first couple of decades. Others, such as
South African Chenin Blanc, stump-vined California Zinfandel or Petite
Syrah, or Spanish Garnacha and Tempranillo, just “keep on trucking”. What
seems to be to be an irrefutable truth is that old vineyards have survived
because they were well suited to the varieties planted and thus have withstood
the test of time.
Surprisingly, many of the oldest surviving vines are not in Europe. Grape
growing has a centuries-long history in California, South America, South
Africa and Australia, and these are the sites where many of the old vines
grow. California has a particularly rich repository of very old vines because
during Prohibition it was not worth replacing them or pulling them out
when there was so little demand for grapes. Europe, having lost many vineyards
to phylloxera, had to replant vineyards on grafted vines, and to keep
the production going, wineries tend to replant significant portions of their
vineyards every two or three decades. According to wine writer Jancis
Robinson:
Growers in countries and regions with a history of continuous, efficient
wine production regularly replace their vines roughly every 30 years or
even more frequently, even though vines can actually survive for more
than a century. This is one reason why there are relatively few seriously
old vines in the classic wine regions of France. However liberally French
wine producers use the term vieilles vignes (old vines) on labels – and similar
expressions such as alte Reben and viñas viejas are used in other EU
countries – there are no regulations governing their use.2
Even here in British Columbia, we have been growing grapes for over a century,
although those originals were generally either table grapes, native
varieties like Labrusca (planted by Father Pandosy when he established a
Catholic mission in Kelowna in the 1800s) or hybrids like MarÈchal Foch,
Verdelet or Bacchus. Among the more notable older vines are Hester
Creek’s Trebbiano, a mainstay of Italian white production, planted in 1968,
and the world’s only known Sovereign Opal (developed at the Summerland
Research Centre), which is now under the Sandhill label from vines dating
back to 1976 in the Mission District’s century-old Casorso Vineyard. Other
plantings of Riesling and Foch, particularly around Kelowna and Lake
Country, also date back to the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Concerns over the loss of these old-timers have resulted in preservation
efforts in Australia, South America, South Africa, California and parts of