Ode to a Grapevine
If I were clever I would pen a poem about grapevines, that’s what they deserve. Hopefully someone else has done that. I love them for the way they look, for the way they take me back in time, and for their ordinary old usefulness. In doing what we can to cool our homes without electricity, we must not overlook the grapevine. Unlike air-conditioning, a grapevine does not produce carbon dioxide, rather it consumes it. A single vine will shade metres of wall, windows and outdoor eating spaces quite happily, without much attention at all. It will absorb the heat and transform it to something good, not just reflect it back onto your house like hard surfaces, even fabric, do.
Vines are drought tolerant—their roots go far—so there’s no need to pamper them with buckets of water in times of water restrictions. To keep them nice and maximise their shading effectiveness, a good hard prune in winter is appropriate. And in spring you might need to keep rampant shoots from reaching into the wrong places, with an occasional hack of the shears. In autumn the fallen leaves go onto the compost pile and thus into next season’s vegetables. Then the winter light streams through the network of bare vine. If you are going to bother about hooking up a shade sail, why not instead hook up something that will support vines.
Our vine doesn’t produce grapes, it’s the ornamental kind, with gorgeous copper colours in autumn. The leaves provide a feast for us, our chooks, the possums, and a few stray caterpillars, which the chooks also love. Stuffed vine leaves in spring are delicious. Once you get a good rolling technique going, they are relatively quick to make (see yesterday's post). You can eat them warm the day you make them, and leftovers make good picnic food.
Ancient vine wood is beautiful. We have a little collection of corkscrews, whose handles are made of vine wood. The feel of the warm wood naturally curved to fit your hand is great when opening an old bottle sealed with cork (before stelvin closures became the sensible option). The sight of gnarled, hundred year old vines, planted by agricultural pioneers is not hard to find. Here in Victoria, Tahbilk winery in the Goulburn Valley, and Bests’ at Great Western have real oldies, by Australian standards, bent, twisted and furrowed: vitis vinifera. If you want to know about the grapevine and human history, go read it somewhere. That story is massive.
