Planting.. planting.. and more planting

The last few weeks have been all about planting vines. Once again, with help from friends and family we have 800 Pinot Noir plants in the ground and growing where the Malbec was before. The Malbec was very difficult and painful to remove at only 6 years old, I can only imagine how difficult it would be to pull out older vines. Attached is a picture of the Pinot Noir this morning. Most plants are starting to push out leaves already and all have buds opening up.

This past weekend was the beggining of replanting the Muscat at the top of the vineyard. The soil is sandy which makes it a bit easier to dig and move around but very muddy when running the irrigation. We are halfway through planting 1650 Riesling vines in this plot. The vines are very high quality, brought over from the Mosel valley in Germany where the best rieslings in the world are produced. We have increased the density of planting to 8 plants per panel (vs. 6 everywhere else on the vineyard) to fit all the plants into one irrigation grid rather than spill into the gewurztraminer grid where the muscat had gone. With high density planting it can be possible to achieve better quality grapes, due to a slightly lower yield per plant but still achieve a profitable tonnage per acre because of the higher number of plants.

Thanks very much to Mike for his weekend of hard work helping to get us started with the riesling. Also thanks to another good friend for the 1982 Chateau Pichon Longueville 'Baron' that we had with our steaks this weekend after a hard day planting. It was a beautiful wine, my birth year and a wonderful expression of old bordeaux elegance and restrained masculinity. Still in it's peak, I would think this will be lovely for another 10 years in it's prime.

Lots more pictures to follow!

Building Completion

With lots of help from friends and family we completed the main arch structure for the winery building a few weeks ago. The back wall is about 50% complete now but we were forced to take a break and tend to pressing vineyard tasks.

All the riesling was pushing buds so it is now tied off and ready to go. The Riesling seems to be the most suited to the vineyard site and it looks very healthy. We went through and picked the best two canes on each plant, carefully bent them over the trellis wire and tied them off. This spreads the fruit load horizontally along the wires ready to grow up. Most of the Gewurztraminer is also tied off now but it is fairly sluggish to get going. We found some trunk disease in a few of the Gewurztraminer and Merlot plants that we will have to moniter closely over the next couple of years. Having seen the success of the Riesling, we will likely look to replant the Gewurztraminer with more riesling in years to come.

The Merlot is now coming out quite nicely as well. With the different pruning style used there, we only have to go through and tie of a few of the vines and train some new spurs where needed.

I hooked up the flail mower to the tractor a couple of weeks ago and mowed the whole vineyard for the first time. It's a pretty violent method of grooming between the rows but with all the rocks on our property a flail mower is the only tool that will do the job effectively. It was interesting learning to back the tractor down the vineyard after mowing some of the rows. With the 6ft extra length on the back it was a bit tricky. We eliminated the tractor turn around space at the top end of some of the rows when we put up the winery building so for now it is necessary.

After mowing, Amy and I hand pulled any weeds that were amongst the vines or in areas where we are planting.