Pinot

No harvests today so much of our time was devoted to maintenance tasks. These include irrigating, cultivating, and in the case of today, caring for the vineyard. Grapes require a lot of grooming and attention over the course of the growing season, to ensure that the fruits mature under the best possible conditions. Good conditions mean good grapes, and good grapes mean good wine--at least in theory. As the boss says, you can make crappy wine from good grapes, but you can't make good wine from crappy grapes.

So into the vineyard I went to tend to the grapes that were assigned to me this week, two rows of pinot noir. First I weedwacked around the trunks to get the remaining weeds and grasses that weren't accessible by the mower. This has to be done extra carefully so as not to whack the trunks, which would injure or scar them. Then I stripped off the growth on the trunks themselves--these protrusions are called suckers. Grapes are very adept at obtaining the water and nutrients required for extremely vigorous growth, which, when that energy is dispersed too thinly amongst copious suckers and sideshoots, is to the fruits' detriment. Pulling off all that excess growth allows much more energy to be dumped into the grapes, giving them the opportunity to grow large and become more flavorful. After cleaning the trunks I did some leaf thinning in the vicinity of the fruits--this entails simply plucking leaves off the branches in minimal quantities to expose the grapes. This allows for more air circulation and access to the sunlight, both of which work to stave off the occurrence of destructive mold and powdery mildew. Finally I had to "dress up the vines," a process of tucking the grapes' towering branches inside guide wires that have been set up along the rows to act as a trellising system. After the whole process was completed the rows looked amazing, just very clean and healthy. It has definitely been one of my favorite projects here on the farm. I took a few pictures of the rows this afternoon; I liked the more abstract ones the best.