Weather permitting, we are installing pencil rods (steel rods about ¼ inch in diameter) in several rows of Marquette that we’ve cut off at the ground. We will train the suckers that come up when the ground warms up in the spring up along the pencil rods so that they have straight trunks. We are gradually replacing all of the Marquette trunks as we convert from a vertical shoot positioning trellis to a high wire cordon trellis. While this will take these vines out of production for a year, the new trellis system will allow us to increase production and quality.
The vineyard crew will help do some extensive maintenance on the filling portion of our bottling line during the first half of January when we are not scheduled to bottle wine. We also will finish maintenance on tractors and Gators and undertake several other minor maintenance tasks.