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Grafting at the Bernkastel Experiment Station
The Nursery
' The wine is made in the vineyard '
Hermann Wiemer understood from his earliest experience the primary importance of proper viticultural practices. Committed to growing the finest-quality vinifera possible from which to craft his wines, Hermann constantly monitors and manages each vineyard planting and microclimate.
The inconsistency in the season-to-season and vintage-to-vintage weather patterns in this region create special challenges even for the vinifera most suited to the overall climate. The weather dictates the vineyard practices from canopy management to fruit sacrifice to harvest timing. Other famous wine regions enjoy fairly constant climates and predictable ranges of temperature, moisture and frost-free season. Wide swings in our local weather patterns, however - late springs; cold spells; cool, wet harvests; early frosts - can make the day-to-day viticultural decisions challenging.
Hermann began his nursery and vineyard in 1973 on an abandoned soybean farm. To relieve the heavy clay shale soils the first exercise was to install 15,000 linear feet of drainage tile. The next order of business was to plant the vinifera vines.
Since vinifera plant material was not available on a commercial basis at that time, Hermann decided to establish a nursery to prepare the stock using his grafting technique and technical knowledge from his early years in Germany. He obtained his initial bud stock from Cornell University's Geneva Experiment Station and grafted it onto American rootstock.
Initially, the grafting was done by hand. As demand for the vines grew into a commercial business, some omega grafting machines were installed in the nursery enabling us to graft up to 400,000 plants a year for distribution throughout the continent.
If you are a grower looking to order grafted vinifera plants please drop us a line through our contact page or give us a call during regular business hours. We have alos posted our current vine availability.
Hermann continues to seek out new ideas and practices to improve his vineyards. Always a pioneer, he was the first in the East to use a technique called 'Concentrated Vinifera Plantings' - spacing plants three feet apart and using severe pruning techniques to improve the grape quality. Today he is involved in bringing the best-practices of sustainable viticulture and IPM to his vineyards.