Planting a Vitiforest
The Vitiforest began with a different curiosity. What if a vineyard were designed less as a controlled production surface and more as a habitat – an orchard of relationships, a living edge?
Designing a vineyard with companions
Most vineyards are built to quiet the world around them. A single species, repeated rows, the same human actions season after season: pruning, mowing, thinning, training, until the landscape becomes an authored script of symmetry and order. There is beauty in that clarity. Vineyards, at their best, can feel like architecture—an intentional shaping of land toward fruit, and fruit toward wine.
There is also a cost; the more we remove natural complexity from a natural place, the more we ask the farmer to supply what the natural system no longer provides. The flip side of single crop human-authored, ordered symmetry is that the plant becomes firmly dependent on the farmer to survive and thus farming becomes a battle to keep the crop supplied with enough fertilizers, agrochemicals, and other interventions to keep it alive in this simplified environment.
The Vitiforest began with a different curiosity. What if a vineyard were designed less as a controlled production surface and more as a habitat—an orchard of relationships, a living edge? Not a return to wilderness, and not a rejection of craft, but an experiment in what becomes possible when vines are allowed to grow with companions rather than alone.
Grapevines, after all, did not originate in monoculture. In their older life, they climbed and threaded through the complexity of forest margins, thickets, and river corridors, sharing light and water and space with trees and shrubs, fungi and insects, birds and grazing animals. Modern viticulture asks vines to perform with human support under simplified austerity. The Vitiforest asks vines what they might express, and what health they might sustain, if they were given a broader natural toolkit.
On an eight-acre parcel at Acania, established in 2025 on the footprint of a struggling apple orchard, we are co-planting grapevines with a broad palette of trees, shrubs, and perennial understory plants. Mulberries and persimmons. Serviceberries, aronia berries, huckleberries. Sichuan pepper, and many others—species chosen not as decoration, but as participants.
Their roots explore different depths. Their leaves cast different shades. Their flowers call different insects. Their litter becomes different food for soil microbes. Together, they create a layered canopy and root system that reshapes microclimate, insect habitat, and nutrient cycling.
This is not a finished design. It is a planting that will mature slowly, and it will not mature on a linear path. Some species will thrive. Some will falter. The balance between them will shift with drought years, wet springs, late frosts, heat spikes, pest cycles. Each season will write its own edits into the composition.
We are less interested in enforcing a fixed picture than in learning how a diverse community organizes itself over time, and how that organization changes the conditions in which vines live.
For now, it is an experiment in companionship—an eight acre place where vine rows do not stand alone, where the vineyard is allowed to have neighbors, and where the future of farming is approached the way good wine is approached: with rigor, humility, and an openness to what emerges.
Soil Biology, measurement, and what emerges
Beneath the surface is where the deeper questions of the Vitiforest reside.
So much of farming happens invisibly. The chemistry of root exudates. The microbial guilds that cycle nutrients. The structure of soil that holds air and water and makes resilience possible. The trading networks of mycorrhizal fungi that connect plants below ground, extending root systems into a shared biological infrastructure.
Grapevines are unusually adept at forming these symbiotic relationships. Through mycorrhizal networks, vines can access nutrients and water beyond the reach of their own roots, buffering stress and participating in a much larger ecology than is visible from the surface. In diverse, living soils, these networks flourish. In simplified systems, they often diminish.
This is one of the underlying motivations of the Vitiforest. Diverse plant communities may support different biological patterns underground than monocultures do. We do not treat that as a slogan. We treat it as a hypothesis worth measuring.
The Vitiforest is therefore both landscape and laboratory. It is a working vineyard, but also an applied research platform. Observation comes before conclusion. Rather than beginning with fixed expectations, we are interested in what emerges when design changes the ecological context of the vine.
We are tracking soil biology here alongside more conventionally designed organic vineyard blocks at Acania. We are interested in microbial diversity, fungal abundance, nutrient cycling, and the broader indicators of living soil function. These measurements are not an end in themselves, but a way of illuminating processes that often remain abstract in agriculture.
Over time, we will also be studying how increased biological diversity coincides with fruit composition. In grapes, secondary metabolites—polyphenols, flavonoids, and related compounds—are foundational to aroma, color, texture, and the layered structure we value in wine. These compounds are part of how plants respond to stress, interaction, and environment. They are also part of what makes wine more than fermented sugar: they are building blocks of complexity.
Academic literature suggests meaningful links between soil biological activity and secondary metabolite production in plants, but cause and effect in living systems is rarely simple. The Vitiforest gives us a place to explore these relationships carefully, without rushing toward conclusions or marketing claims.
If there is a philosophy to this work, it is modest. Resilience and quality may not always arise from tighter control. They may arise from better relationships—between plants and soils, fungi and roots, insects and flowers, animals and vegetation, and the human attention that shapes the whole.
The Vitiforest asks us to farm with patience. Less like managers of exceptions, more like students of patterns. It invites a kind of long-term listening that modern agriculture rarely rewards: to build a community of plants, then observe long enough to hear what that community is saying.
We do not yet know what the Vitiforest will become. That uncertainty is part of its purpose.
This is an experiment in ecological design, rigorous measurement, and openness to what emerges—approached the way good wine is approached: with curiosity, humility, and time.
