We will start the week by finishing pruning of all vines at Newport Lane Vineyard. Then, we’ll start tucking the VSP trellised Marquette and La Crescent vines at Meadowcreek Vineyards. What this means is that the canes are trained to grow upward on these vines and we want the canes to stay between the catch wires on the trellis. This is a time-consuming job.
Steuben is our problem-child. After a severe winter like we’ve just experienced, we lose the weaker vines and the remaining vines look pretty pathetic. This year, we won’t get much of a harvest and many of the Steuben vines are dead. We have some replacement potted vines coming but our losses are far greater than what we have coming. We’ve already moved them from Newport Lane Vineyard costing us three years of production. Stay tuned.
Assuming we don’t get much rain this week, we will start spraying herbicide and fungicide. We will also start mowing. Finally, we hope to start preparing the area where we will plant new Itasca and Verona vines. Itasca is a new grape variety from the University of Minnesota that is used to make white wine. Verona is a Tom Plocher hybrid that is used to make a red wine. It has very prominent raspberry notes.
We’ve now pruned 31,000 of our 38,500 vines.
