🌿 Grapevine seedling

A grapevine seedling, or planting vine, is a young rooted vine ready to be planted in a vineyard. It is usually a small plant with roots and a few buds or shoots. It is grown in a special nursery.

Most often a vine for planting has two parts. The lower is the rootstock, which provides roots resistant to disease and pests, for example phylloxera. The upper is the scion, the desired variety that will bear the grapes. The parts knit together after grafting. The nursery grows the plants until they are strong.

In spring the young vines are planted on a prepared site, watered and protected. In the first years the vine grows and takes shape without a full crop. The first grapes usually come in the third year, and a full yield later.

The quality of the planting vine shapes the vineyard's fate for decades. Healthy vines tested for disease give even plantings. That is why growers buy them from reliable nurseries.

Phylloxera was first spotted in France in 1866, and grafting European vines onto American rootstocks began only in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Today about 99 % of commercial rootstocks are combinations of Vitis riparia, rupestris and berlandieri, and most of 60 studied rootstocks derive from just three selections. A single rootstock, 41B (berlandieri × Chasselas, released in 1894), sits in roughly 80 % of Champagne's vineyards.