From Our Vineyard

Last week, we hand-harvested the Foch at Newport Lane and then completed harvests of Marquette, Petite Pearl, and Crimson Pearl. We also applied fertilizer to the newly planted Foch vines at Meadowcreek. This week, we harvested Petite Pearl and Verona at Tassel Ridge. We then moved the

We are focused on harvesting right now. When the grapes are ready, we don’t do anything else until they are harvested. We are machine harvesting most grapes and we start at 3 A.M. to get the grapes when they are at their coolest. In our Foch vineyard

We harvested Brianna at the Tassel Ridge Vineyard last week. The yield was low but the quality looked good. While we are waiting for more grapes to ripen, we have been focused on removing Virginia Creeper (aka Parthenocissus quinquefolia) from our vineyards. Virginia Creeper is native to

This year has been unlike any previous year in that grapes were slow to develop and then very slow to increase sugar content. We are testing daily and are ready to harvest but the grapes are not ready. Normally, we would have started with Brianna by August

We raised the grow tubes on the young vines we planted in June. This is the third time we have done that and it is to protect the tender apical shoots from deer predation. The deer think these shoots are the best salad they can think of!

In the past week, we mowed both the Tassel Ridge® and Meadowcreek Vineyards and because of the rain, they really needed to be mowed. We also got ready for more rain by pumping the lagoons. We continued tying up the vines, straightened pencil rods, and secured them

Last week, the vineyard team worked on tying up vines and removing suckers. Suckers are vine shoots that come up annually from the roots. They also completed repairs on broken posts and on mowing between the rows at the Maple Woods Vineyard. This week, we sprayed for

We removed suckers and tied up the LaCrosse vines at Maple Woods Vineyard. Rain helps the vines grow but the weeds seem to grow faster so we weed-whacked the newly planted vines at Meadowcreek Vineyard. These new vines are growing so fast that they were actually growing

Rain is very important at this time of year as the grapes are just beginning their race to maturity. But, it prevents mowing, tree removal, and even spraying of fungicides, insecticides, and nutrients. So, we’ll be happy to get some dry weather that will permit us to

Rain makes spraying and moving any heavy equipment in the vineyards difficult if not impossible. So, we have been limited in what we can do. We have focused on tasks that involve people on foot in the vineyards removing suckers and tying up the Crimson Pearl at