Out With The Old and In With…A New Vineyard??

Good Afternoon! 

We hope everyone is having a good day today – knowing there are some of you who are just getting back in the swing of things, having been off for the holiday break…maybe even wishing you had another day off…while some of you are just happy to be back at work(!)

Today we are talking with Eric about the vineyards.  We seem to have less of them, and perhaps I am not here often enough, but I think one of our vineyards got eaten up overnight by a really big groundhog (and their family too – must be Italian).

Anyway, part of the front vineyard has been replaced.  As you come up the lane (that’s what we call our really long driveway –I’ll have to talk with the management about naming it!), the vineyard on the right side of the lane is now a big plot of tilled soil.  It has been “subsoiled” and tilled – I’ve included a picture below.  Eric uses subsoiling to break up any hard layers of soil to allow the roots of the new vines an easier time to grow and easy entry of water into the soil for those roots.  He then follow with tilling which turns the earth over.  The new vineyard, which will be replanted in the varietal Chambourcin, will be going in sometime this spring.  There is a lot of prep work that goes into making a vineyard, which includes preparing the soil, putting in the posts and anchor posts, and stringing the trellis.  The grapevines come to us looking like a short stick with a little bulb of roots.  The first grapes from this vineyard will be harvested in the fall of 2017.

If you ever come up to the winery and want to get a view of all of the vineyards, you’ll have to walk to the top of the hill that sits adjacent to the big barn that the tasting room is located in.  We have a total of five separate vineyards (depending on what you call separate) with a total of fifteen different varieties of grapes planted on seventy acres.

I am very saddened to report that the fifty million grapes (seemingly no exaggeration) that my brothers and I planted are no longer in existence (#sadsob).  However, the good news is that the grapes that are currently planted make better tasting wine (#smileyface).

On most days, in the tasting room, we have four dry (not sweet) white and five red dry grape wines to taste, eleven different types of semi-sweet grapes wines and nine varieties of semi-sweet fruit/honey wines.

Well, that’s it for now – please enjoy your day, smile and have fun.

-pinky