From Our Vineyard

Last week, we got tractors fixed and ready for vineyard work. We will be ordering fertilizer, fungicide, and other chemicals. And, as soon as it dries out, we will start mechanical pruning. Every day, after mechanical pruning, we will spray the vines we pruned with Spurshield®, a polymeric material

The warming weather and the long-range forecast for warmer than usual weather for the next six weeks means that we will begin machine pruning very soon. We need at least two people and preferably three people to machine prune. We will prune one day and spray Spur

The soils in our Tassel Ridge Vineyard at the Winery are a mix of loess and loam with pockets of clay. Loess is a sandy windblown soil that drains well and when combined with the loam, we have well-drained, rich soils. The loess soils blew in from

While the vines are sound asleep, we are getting ready for pruning, spraying, and fertilizing. And, we are keeping our eyes on the temperatures. While the vines are fully dormant, they are still sensitive to major drops in air temperatures. It is as though they have temperature

We have plenty of equipment that requires annual servicing and with the vineyard now snow covered, we are using our equipment sheds to get everything ready for pruning and fertilizing in the spring. Last week, we talked about the survivability of our cold-climate grapevines when it is

Working in the vineyard with 8 inches of snow on the ground is not possible so we will shift to indoor tasks until the snow melts. A major indoor project is to investigate ways of modifying our granular fertilizer spreader to deliver fertilizer only under the vines

We finished mowing the 35 acre Tassel Ridge Vineyard with our new Fischer under-vine mower. With this new machine, we can mow the grass-covered aisle between the trellises and simultaneously the strip under the trellis on both sides of the mower simultaneously. We have found that we

We finished removing the acre of Sabrevois vines that were more than 20 years old. They were located in the northwest corner of the Tassel Ridge vineyard. We had not harvested fruit from those vines for more than five years. We then mowed the grass strips at

We have now removed trees from the entire 33-acre Tassel Ridge Vineyard. This is a big step because trees and shrubs will prevent us from eliminating weeds that grow under the vines. These weeds compete for the nutrients that we will apply in the spring. You might

The vineyard team focused over the past two-three weeks on removing trees from the east side of the Tassel Ridge Vineyard and they are now working on the west side. They have also started work on the Steuben Block at Meadowcreek Vineyard. We ordered a new piece