Growing a Grapevine from a Cutting — Roots in a Jar of Water

Grapevines are almost never grown from seed — seedlings are slow and don't come true. Instead you take a CUTTING from an existing vine, root it, and plant it. Because it is a piece of the parent, the new vine is an exact clone: same variety, same grapes, fruiting in about two to three years.

In winter, while the vine is bare and dormant, choose a healthy, firm, well-ripened cane from last summer's growth, about as thick as a pencil. Cut a length with 3-4 buds on it. Make the BOTTOM cut straight across, just below a bud; make the TOP cut on a slant, about 2 cm above the top bud. The flat-versus-slanted ends are how you remember which way is UP — a cutting planted upside-down will never grow.

Put the cutting in a jar with the bottom few centimetres in water, flat (bottom) end down, on a warm, bright windowsill out of scorching sun. Change the water every few days so it stays fresh. Over roughly two to three weeks (about 20 days) you'll see white roots pushing out from the base, and often a bud breaking into leaf up top.

Optional: soak chopped young willow twigs in the water, or dip the base in rooting hormone first. Willow is naturally rich in the rooting hormone (auxin) that tells the cut end to make roots — grapes root readily, but this nudges shy ones along.

Once it has a good handful of roots a few centimetres long, pot it into potting soil — don't leave it in water too long or the water-roots get brittle. Bury the lower buds, leave the top bud or two above the soil, water in and label the variety.

Grow the young vine on in its pot in a bright spot, harden it off to outdoor conditions, then plant it in spring in a warm, sunny place with something to climb. Keep it watered its first year while the roots spread. It should give you its first bunches of grapes in two to three years.

The grapevine is the textbook HARDWOOD cutting — a length of dormant, woody, last-year's stem that roots so willingly you can do it in a jar of water. Its cells near the base, given warmth and moisture, switch on and grow brand-new ADVENTITIOUS roots from nowhere, while a bud up top breaks into a shoot, so one cut stick becomes a whole plant. Two details make grapes their own lesson. First, POLARITY: a stem cutting 'knows' which end is which, and roots will only form at the end that was lowest on the plant while shoots form at the top — plant it upside-down and it sulks and dies, which is exactly why you cut the bottom flat and the top on a slant, a simple code for which way is up. Second, WHY CLONE at all: grapes are highly variable from seed and slow to fruit, but a cutting is a genetic copy of the parent, so it keeps the variety perfectly true and fruits years sooner — the same reason we take cuttings of any prized woody plant. Grapes root from soft summer cuttings and, most reliably, from these dormant winter hardwood cuttings (which is convenient, since you cut plenty of suitable canes off every time you winter-prune a vine). There's one twist worth knowing: modern vineyard vines are usually GRAFTED — a cutting of the fruiting variety joined onto a rootstock of American grape species — because in the 1800s a root-feeding insect called phylloxera nearly wiped out Europe's vines, and only the resistant American roots survived, so today the top and the roots of a wine vine are often two different grapes. But for a home vine, a simple rooted cutting in a jar of water is all it takes to turn one good grape into many.