From Our Vineyard

Most of our Marquette and all of the La Crescent are trellised on a VSP or vertical shoot positioning trellis system. The objective of this system is to assure that the fruit and most of the leaves are exposed to morning sun on the east side of

Our grapevines are in bloom. Compared to daffodils or tulips, their blooms are very unimpressive as the attached photo shows. First of all, each flower is very small and second, it is only at the pollinating stage for 2–3 days. You have to look quick. Initially, each

Although our vines are nearly three weeks behind last year, the warm weather has told them that spring is here and it’s time to break buds and grow leaves. The change in just ten days is dramatic. We are bringing pruning to a close, especially in the

I am feeling as though we’ve had two days of spring and now it’s summer. I think the vines are feeling the same. We have had a very long and cool spring that has left our vines about three weeks behind last year. At the beginning of

We are still working on hand pruning Edelweiss, Brianna, and Petite Pearl at Tassel Ridge. With 17 acres of Edelweiss vines, our Edelweiss blocks at Tassel Ridge are huge and they take a long time to hand prune. As soon as we finish the Edelweiss, we will

We finished most of our mechanical pruning last week so we are focused on hand pruning at Tassel Ridge this week with an emphasis on our 17-acre Edelweiss block. Once that is done, we will move to the LaCrosse block at Newport Lane. Last week, we made

Although we have had a lot of rain and other weather that makes vineyard operations impossible, Monday and Tuesday’s weather was perfect for mechanical pruning. We got all of the 36 acres at Tassel Ridge and most of the 10 unpruned acres at Meadowcreek mechanically pruned. Future

Cold, rainy weather has prevented us from doing much pruning this month. One good outcome of this weather is that our vines are still dormant and have not begun to awaken from their winter’s sleep. That means that a late frost is less likely to damage buds.