Hello, bonjour, and welcome to your new Bonner Private Wines video. Today, I want to answer a simple question many wine lovers are wondering about: how long can vines—vines that are cropped to make grapes for winemaking of course, we talking about here—how long those vines can live for? And I want to touch on briefly the life cycle of a vineyard as well.
How long after planting do you actually get a decent crop? How young vines, you know, can produce grapes? How young can they be before they start producing the benefits of old vines? These type of things. Let’s go.
How Long Do Vines Live For?
The question is simple, but the answer is twofold. In short, it depends. What does it depend on? Well, how dry the climate is.
So to keep our answer simple here, let’s consider the two extreme scenarios. In a relatively rainy environment, in climate like in Bordeaux or Burgundy, in France, or certain parts of Oregon and Washington, where it rains quite a bit on the Atlantic coast of Spain or in the U.K., for example. Yes, they do produce wine. In the U.K., vineyards are very vigorous.
We say they grow very green and very quickly, large leaves and everything. They also tend to produce a lot of grapes. So vines fire up more quickly in those regions. A grower will have to consider pulling out the old vines and replant the entire vineyard after about 40 years because yields will start decreasing too much to remain economically viable when the vines are too old. Here, young vines will produce a lot because there’s a lot of water, but their production will decrease quite quickly after just a few decades.
On the opposite hand, in very dry climates, like in central Spain, in inland parts of California, like in Lodi, or in the extreme altitude vineyards of Argentina indeed, the near absence of water forces vines to grow very slowly and produce very little crops.
So vineyards age slower and longer, just like, you know, the olive trees can grow for centuries because they grow really slowly. Same case here in those semi-arid areas vines reach 80 years old, 100 years old, 150 years old in extreme cases, and they still produce a decent amount of grapes, not huge amounts, but decent yields, considering those areas produce low levels of crop to start with.
So all vines in dry climates take advantage of their long, deep root systems that dug far within the earth to get the real water from really, really deep. So they get smaller crops all along their lifecycle, but for much, much longer decades, almost centuries, sometimes.
The Life Cycle of a Vineyard
Let’s briefly go over what the life of a vine looks like. What does it feel like to go through life if you’re a vine?
Growers usually plant baby vines that are already two or three years old. Those are carried in a nursery. You buy them from a plant nursery because you can’t really efficiently plant grape seeds just in the field and grow vines. That doesn’t work like this. Those toddler vines won’t really produce much grapes for the first two or three years in the vineyards.
So until they reach five or six years old. From there, when vines are between five and say, 15 years old, they are what we call young vines that will produce usually a lot of grapes, making wines that are simpler, more fruit driven and not very concentrated, just really youthful and punchy wines, but not much depth to them. Like an adolescent, if you wish, type of wine. That’s what young vines make. As a winemaker, we use those for entry level wines.
In general, when vineyards get to 15, 20 years of age is really when you start obtaining more complexity, more maturity in the wines, more concentration because the yields are lower vines have really deep root systems to extract all the goodness from the terroir, and they have more parenting experience to crop better grapes after 30 years or so, depending on the region.
Vineyards are considered old vines and you start getting really rich, complex, very interesting wines until the vineyards reach 40 or 50, 45 or 50 years old. In wet climates, when you have to restart the cycle again and replant your vineyards because the vines are just tired. Well, if you are in a dry environment, well, vines will continue producing for another few decades, as we’ve seen.
And that’s in short, your lifecycle of a vineyard. I did make a detailed video on all the qualities and the benefits of old vines when it comes to the characteristics of the vineyards themselves made from old vines. So I’m deliberately keeping these video fairly short here because I don’t want to repeat things that I’ve already explained, but if you want to learn more about how wines from old vines are better, then why watch this video right here.
That’s it for me today. Thanks for watching and I will see you soon. In the wonderful world of wine. Cheers.
