From Our Vineyard

The vineyard crew continues to long-prune, remove weeds with the weed badger, and spray herbicide under the vines, all while working around the weather. They will also start spraying sulfur on the trunks and cordons of the vines as soon as it dries out a bit. In

The weather last week was not conducive to much outdoor work. Nonetheless, we made progress in long pruning Frontenac, St. Croix, and Marquette at both Newport Lane and Meadowcreek. This week, we will tighten the trellis wires at Tassel Ridge and then start mechanical pruning. We will

Last week’s weather made for challenging times in the vineyard. Temperatures were high enough only by Thursday to permit much work to be started. And, because the vineyard was still pretty wet, we couldn’t use any heavy equipment, so all work was done manually. So, this week,

The vineyard crew finished long pruning and tying all of the vines in our Maple Woods vineyard last week. Next week, they will work on one block of Edelweiss at Tassel Ridge to get it long pruned and tied up on the trellis. We are “long pruning” at

Adam, our Vineyard Manager, is getting the final maintenance tasks taken care of. He is also hand pruning the new Maple Woods vineyard so that the trunks are straight and each vine has two arms at the high wire. This is particularly important because we will start machine

Adam, our Vineyard Manager, is getting the final maintenance tasks done now before we start pruning on February 27. That includes work on some equipment (there is always something that needs attention) like electrical pruners, fixing a leaking cylinder on our harvester, repairing (or maybe replacing) the

Our Vineyard Manager, Adam Nunnikhoven, is working on implementing several improvements for our vineyard operations in 2017. We are trying out a tying machine that will be used on the vines. It applies a bio-degradable tie that secures the vine for a year or two without risking

Vineyard work is now focused on planning for next year. This includes developing the vineyard plan and budget for 2017, getting chemicals ordered, ordering vineyard post signs, updating the Safety Data Sheet File, and updating procedures for our quality system. We have a bit more herbicide to

We are using our Weed Badger to mechanically remove weeds in our vineyards. This is a slow process, but the combination of mechanically removing weeds and then applying a pre-emergent will help us reduce the size and vigor of weeds in the vineyards next year. Our vineyard

We need to blow our irrigation system so water doesn’t freeze in the lines when it gets cold. We continue to replace broken posts in the vineyard and we found some more mulberry trees in our Marquette vineyard that we dug up. We will winterize our Hagie