Alto Wine Group Inc.

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Alan Dickinson
250-535-1558
alan@driversden.ca

More pictures 2

More pictures

Foundation finished, Amy moved up, winery building half up and bud break!

I have had an extremely busy last few weeks between construction, Amy arriving and work in the vineyard. Since my last post, the winery foundation has been mostly completed. Our contractor did not complete the job as we had discussed so everything is done with the exception of the crush pad out front. This will not hinder our construction but needless to say, we have not paid him out yet.

My brother Stuart was up for a week visiting and helping with the winery building. Between him, Thor and I, we managed to make pretty good progress. The normal method for erecting arched metal buildings is to assemble each arch on the ground and hoist them up. The size of our building prevents that from being possible so we must bolt on each piece individually. There are still arches to complete which I will be working on this week.

Last week Amy moved up. Her parents helped out in the vineyard with wire tensioning and digging up a plot for the vegetable garden. Once the building is complete I'll pickup a couple of loads of compost and we can plant. We should have more vegetables than we can eat.

We have been carefully monitoring the vineyard over the past few weeks. The warm spring has led to an early bud break. I saw the first signs almost 2 weeks ago on a merlot vine. Since then, the riesling is fully out, gewurztraminer is well on its way and the merlot is making slow, steady progress. Even the Muscat that we are going to replant is coming out on a few plants. I really need to complete the building and get on with the replant now. It will probably take the better part of a month to remove the Muscat and plant more Riesling up top, and remove the Malbec and replant Pinot Noir down below. After toying with the idea of a high density planting of Riesling where the Muscat is, we have more or less settled on inter-planting Riesling and seeing what the Muscat does over the coming year. If it recovers we can keep it and if not, pull it out next year.

I will post a number of pictures this morning showing our progress over the last few weeks and Amy will be making her first post in the next couple of days.

Backfill and Rebar ready for final pour!

The concrete guys have finished the backfill for the winery foundation and laid rebar ready for the final pad to be poured. They also laid the trench drain in place for drainage from the winery floor. Before backfilling we also laid down a conduit for the electrical line running from the building underground to the pumphouse and house.

I also setup the BBQ and we have a firepit/barbeque entertaining area ready for visitors now. Bring Meat!

Darby and Scruffy have been busy supervising the foundation work along with performing pest control duties. We get a large heard of deer in the neighbour's field behind our house each night around 7:30pm that stick around for a few hours. Scruffy and Darby sent them off the other night and chased them all the way back down the property line. We have not seen the deer behind the house since.

More Pictures

A few of the foundation walls before and after application of the styrofoam insulation. Also, Amy in the vineyard!

Catch up post

I have been really busy getting the place ready for Amy then picking her up along with all our stuff in Vancouver. Amy is back in Vancouver until the middle of the month but we have the place all setup and Scruffy has Darby here as his wingman on the vineyard.

The winery building has progressed well with the frost wall and foundation wall in and cured. They are now lined with styrofoam insulation ready for the backfill and leveling and then the pad to be poured. We are not far off putting the building together now. Thor and I are tentatively planning on starting early next week. Although everything goes together very easily it will be physically very demanding erecting the arches and fastening everything together. Anyone who fancies a little farm labour is welcome to come for a visit!

While Amy was here we painted the entire inside of the house and built a walk-in closet in the laundry room. It is nice and cozy in here now and with internet and electricity, all we are missing is the septic hookup. I have arranged to use a shower in a local motel while they finish the septic hookup and we have an outhouse on the property for temporary use. I also crawled under the trailer yesterday and strapped in the anchors for the house. I dug and filled 3 foot deep holes underneath with concrete and a steel auger last week. I used 5000lb rachet straps to crank down the building in case of a big wind storm.

We have lots of interesting developments on the business front and we could be working with some prominant groups to produce small batches of wine.

I'll have lots more up this week as the concrete work is finished and we follow up on business leads.