Earlier this year, during the March doldrums, Caine Thompson and Joe Nielsen pulled out every tenth vine in every fifth row of nine acres of the Ram’s Gate estate vineyards in Sonoma County’s rolling Carneros region. They replaced each of the uprooted vines with a one-year-old fruit tree.
When the two were finished, a total of 500 heirloom trees were growing across a third of Ram’s Gate’s 30-acre vineyard – a veritable orchard of apple, pear, cherry, quince, plum, peach, fig and nectarine trees (42 different heirloom cultivars in all). And the duo plans to plant trees in a one-third more of the vineyard in 2026 and the final third in 2027.
Thompson, who is head of sustainability at Ram’s Gate, and Nielsen, the estate director and winemaker, may be the only vintners in the Carneros – and perhaps in all of California – with a 500-tree orchard in their vineyards, but they have good company abroad.
For example, the renowned Château Cheval Blanc in St. Emilion has planted a thousand trees along the perimeters and interior of their First Growth vineyard. And Château Palmer in Margaux has been growing trees and hedge rows among its vines for more than a dozen years. The Champagne house Ruinart has committed to planting 25,000 trees and shrubs in its 100-acre Taissy vineyard.
Establishing small forests among the vines may seem counterintuitive to farming – all that lost production and for what? Yet polyagriculture in all its forms, in this case agroforestry, has been a growing trend in recent years as the emphasis on sustainability has taken hold in the world’s vineyards. Planting cover crops to provide a great diversity of plants among vine rows is now common, as is having flocks of sheep munch among the vines, adding their own fertilizer during winter months.
But full-grown trees? And lots of them?
“I kept reading in publications about the benefits of trees being highlighted in Bordeaux and Champagne,” Thompson explains. “So last July [in 2024], I arranged a trip to see how it was implemented. And I was fascinated by it – across 90 acres of Cheval Blanc, you could see this vast array of fruit trees. You could feel the energy in the vineyards.”
Here is the way Cheval Blanc officially explains its fascination: “At Cheval Blanc, trees are at the very center of our farming practices. They have a clearly defined role. They create a network below ground via mycorrhizae which connect cover plants, vines and other trees and enable the distribution and sharing of the trees’ nutritive elements.
“During dry weather, the trees act as conduits for water ensuring that the vines are hydrated,” the information reads. “The tree canopies offer protection and nesting for birds and insects, both of which play an important role as natural predators of vineyard pests.”
In Champagne, Ruinart says it has “initiated an ambitious reforestation project. In collaboration with Reforest’Action, the Maison will plant nearly 25,000 trees and shrubs in its Taissy vineyard.”
I first encountered tree-planting in the vineyards about 10 years ago while re-visiting Château Palmer of the Left Bank to see what was new. Director Thomas Duroux took me out into the vineyards to show where he was planting hedge rows among the vines as well as a handful of saplings. I also saw the Palmer cattle grazing along the banks of the Gironde estuary.
“We want to increase our flock to 100 sheep,” Duroux told me at the time, “and move from the seven cows we have now to 25. I want to plant barley and oats between the vine rows. Trees in the vineyard. I want to taste a Palmer peach and eat fig marmalade made at Palmer.”
I asked Duroux what his board of directors thought about his establishing a vineyard orchard. “I started planting out of sight of the château,” he said, partly in jest, partly seriously, “where they can’t see the trees when they visit.”
At Ram’s Gate, Thompson says that they will monitor how the trees may be affecting the grapes and the vines, both in the vineyard and in the wines produced, including vine development and phenolics and acidity of grapes growing near the trees. As for the fruit production, “We have a winery chef, and he’s excited about the fruit trees,” Thompson says. “He helped with the plantings.”
Of course, there is a natural affinity between grapes and trees. Long before there was pruning and stakes and trellising, wild grape vines sought out trees as a method of support and as a route to needed sunlight. When I was a kid growing up on a small farm in West Virginia, we would find sturdy vines on the hillsides that had climbed into the oaks and other forest trees. Then we would cut the vine at its base and use it as a Tarzan-style swing, the tentacles in the high branches easily supporting our weight.
Of course, having their vines growing into the trees is not what Ram’s Gate or Cheval Blanc has in mind (or at least I don’t think so), but wine is being made in one South American vineyard that does have vines growing into trees along its periphery. Julio and Juan Bouchon assumed control of the family’s J. Bouchon winery in Chile’s Maule Valley in 2014, Julio told me, and, “When Juan and I took over from my father, we were looking for more identity for our winery.”
Most vines growing in the old País [a.k.a. the Mission grape variety] vineyard owned by the Bouchons were head-pruned, as is usually the case with old-vine vineyards. Wines made from these old vines are labeled “J. Bouchon País Viejo.” But the Bouchons also found vines at the edges of the vineyard that were growing into the trees, as did their wild ancestors, and these vines were still producing clusters of fruit.
The Bouchons decided to make wine from these tree vines as well, most liking employing Chile’s only picking crews that brought tall ladders to harvest grapes. They called these wines “J. Bouchon País Salvaje.” “Salvaje” means “savage” or “wild,” either definition being a good one. There is both a red and a white version.
So, where does this leave us? In my 50 years of talking with winemakers, I have enjoyed hearing dozens of tales and formulae from winegrowers about “the right way” or a “better way” to grow grapes and make wines. Listening to the philosophies behind these passionate ideas have been what has driven me to continue ardently exploring wine culture.
Yet the amusing thing – and a very delightful thing – is that almost all of these winemakers make very good to great wines. But so do the winegrowers whose methodology is the virtually opposite way of doing things. So, I concluded long ago there are many ways to make excellent wines, and that the wines’ back stories are mostly all equally delightful to listen to and write about.
Another delightful thing is that some of these prophets opposing existing orthodoxies are underfunded garagistes making wine in open-top fermenters in their corners of warehouse wine ghettos. And others are the Cheval Blancs and Ram’s Gates who have the funding necessary to do amazing transformations.
It takes a lot of money to plant trees, to lose grape production, and to be able to wait many vintages to see if it was all worth it. Money doesn’t grow on trees, even at Cheval Blanc, even if grapes come close to it.