This week, we finished the pruning and tying up of Foch and LaCrosse at Newport Lane and Itasca, Verona, and Crimson Pearl at Tassel Ridge Vineyard. We took advantage of still air to spray fungicide and we used our weed badger to clean weeds out of a
Read more →We have had nice weather during the daytime hours so we’ve really made great progress with pruning. Itasca and Verona are new varieties that may not be familiar to you. Itasca makes a white wine. It is a grape variety that was developed at the University of
Read more →We have taken advantage of the nice weather and have continued to prune Edelweiss. We are making great progress. The recent cold snaps got our attention. With sap moving up the vines, buds are starting to swell but we think they were still hard enough and temperatures
Read more →Good weather, defined as no rain nor high winds, has allowed us to start pruning our Edelweiss. This is going to take some time because we have 17 acres of Edelweiss. While we hadn’t seen any bud growth as of last week, the warm weather last week
Read more →Last week, we finished hand pruning the Sabrevois, and also the St. Pepin and Brianna, all at Maple Woods. We mechanically pruned Edelweiss with our V-Mech at Tassel Ridge this week and switched to follow-up hand pruning Edelweiss by mid-week. With 17 acres of Edelweiss, this project
Read more →The weather, while not perfect for pruning this week, did allow for a couple of days in the vineyard and we made good progress. The Sabrevois is located at Tassel Ridge and Maple Woods Vineyards. Because we didn’t need this variety last year, we didn’t prune it.
Read more →On nice weather days, we are already out in the vineyard getting started with hand pruning. Some varieties start to bud out as soon as they are pruned so we avoid those varieties for now and start on varieties like Marquette and La Crescent that can be
Read more →We are doing a bit of hand pruning when weather and other priorities permit. Adam’s goal is to get two rows of Marquette pruned each day. These vines have already been machine-pruned so these are the finishing touches. Our harvester has sprung a small oil leak. We
Read more →We are doing oil changes on a tractor and a Gator housed at Maple Woods Vineyard. We have also started researching additional vineyard mechanization. Our V-Mech pre-pruner does a good job but it requires three people to operate: one in the tractor and two on the V-Mech.
Read more →We dismantled and rebuilt our mechanical pruner and tried it out on Monday. On Tuesday, we deep-cleaned the bottling line, power washed the floors, and got everything ready for bottling in January. Our electrically-powered hand pruners needed to be overhauled, cleaned, and have their blades sharpened this
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