Vineyard Journal

We have bud break on the Viognier! We pruned the Viognier in early March, and on April 1, Mike noticed the first signs of buds breaking out of the vines. Bud break, of course, means the vines have come out of their long winter hibernation. They’ve rested and soaked up energy reserves from our fertilized soil, and are now ready to slowly start growing wood, leaves and ultimately fruit. Each bud breaking from the...

We finished pruning our vines last week, just before the end of winter. All told, we pruned about 2300 vines. Mike did a few, and our vineyard manager brought in a crew of 3-4 people to do the rest over a couple of days.  Winter pruning is the first step in quality and ripeness control for the grapes that we’ll harvest in the fall. After growing through the spring and summer, our vines typically stretch six feet...

One of our Winter jobs is replacing dying or dead vines that have succumbed to old age, disease, or gophers. We have roughly 2,300 Syrah vines in the vineyard (spaced six feet apart, with fruiting arms about six feet long), and typically replace up to 5% of our vines each year. But this year is different. Ultimately, we’re planning to more than double the vineyard’s Syrah vine count (we’ll explain why in a future...