I like lichen...

...but I'm besotted with bryophytes, aka mosses.  Which is just as well as Vinoland is covered in the green stuff right now: everywhere is very moist.  There has been quite a lot of rain thus far in 2019 and more is on its way.
Unfortunately, I don't know much about mosses.  I think moss is a fascinating plant, the way it can go dormant and survive through California's arid summers alone is amazing.  But with about 13,000 different species worldwide it is nigh impossible for me to identify any that are thriving in Vinoland right now.
I started pruning the Pinot grigio vines yesterday and it was a little concerning to me to be trampling all over the myriad of mosses that are growing between the rows and near the vines.  My anthropomorphism is raging right now, I'm contemplating wearing earplugs so I can be spared the bawling of the bryophytes.

Choose your Chardonnay.

It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.  Another staff blind-tasting at TWWIAGE this time squared off the 2016 Chardonnay (CH) against five other 2016s.  Once again, the TWWIAGE contender happened to be my favourite of the bunch.  For me, the second best wine turned out to be a 2016 Gary Farrell, Russian River Selection (Russian River Valley AVA).  My tasting notes were thus; candy, caramel apple, toast, nice mouthfeel.  A rather lovely little wine.
My least favourite wine, and the lowest rank amongst the majority of my fellow co-workers (great taste buds taste alike?), was a 2016 Mer Soleil Reserve (Santa Lucia Highlands AVA).  In my opinion, this wine was absolutely undrinkable.  And, surprise, surprise, or not, this wine hails from the cellars of the Wagner Family of Wines (Caymus...titter, titter).  Who drinks this stuff?  Apparently someone does because the Wagners make 59,000 cases of this plonk.
I'm so glad that there are alternative winemaking styles being employed with Chardonnay nowadays.  I personally never bought into the California style of this the most impressionable of grape varieties.  More choice is always good for the consumer, just don't choose the Mer Soleil.

Last night's tipple.

I love bubbly, I do.  I generally prefer a Blanc de noirs over a Blanc de blancs, but, honestly, if it is fresh and well balanced I'll drink it.  So when I was introduced to Tipp Rambler (TR), which is 100% Pinot noir, I was intrigued.  And thirsty.
A novel concept, in snazzy packaging (that almost Tiffany Blue, very attractive), I didn't quite get this little tipple at first.  It wasn't that TR was a bad wine; it wasn't flawed, it's just that it tasted like a sparkling rosé not a sparkling wine.  A subtle distinction, I know, but tasting is in the, erm, taste buds of the beholder, or something like that.  And it did not go with my grilled salmon, a tad disappointing.
It wasn't until I visited the TR website that I started to understand this little wine-offering.  I believe psychology has a lot to do with enjoying any wine and sitting around Vinoland on a Saturday evening just wasn't the best way to experience TR.  The whole concept of a portable libation, as a take-along to a picnic, a BYOB party or a barbeque, now rang an oenological-bell in my head.  TR comes in a four-pack, each bottle containing 187 ml.  I was gifted just one bottle of TR but it is something that I would indeed buy.  I'm not the TR target, but then I'm rarely anybody's target.  Sigh.

A quick fix.

Still suffering from a bit of a shopping-hangover from Christmas, this afternoon, when I had resolved to start pruning the Vinoland vineyard, I was faced with a bit of a dilemma; having worn out the left thumb of my old pruning gloves I really needed a new pair, today.  Not wanting to drive over to a certain hardware store on the other side of Napa to procure a pair, I decided to do a quick patch job with duct tape (AKA gaffer tape in Blighty) on my old gloves.  It did the trick.  In fact, I doubled up the tape and have decided to try to make my old faithfuls last one more pruning season.  Gloved-fingers crossed.

THIS is a weed.

I had to clamber down into a gully, contort my upper body and click away blindly with my phone, arm outstretched, to get a photograph of this winsome, little weed.  It was worth it.
Hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta), a member of the mustard family, is a weed whose leaves grow close to the ground in a rosette.  It's not a very tall plant, it has attractive, diminutive white flowers and I just love how unassumingly delicate it seems.  Looks can be deceiving, however.  My favourite thing about this weed is the violent, spring-loaded flinging of its mature seeds if you so much as look sideways at it.  Watch out!  I do love weeds (I might have mentioned that once, or twice, before), what I don't love is weed.
I get an awful lot of unsolicited emails in my Vinsanity inbox.  Most of them are wine-related, but not all.  (I tend to simply ignore the ones that mention Muscat/Muscato, titter, titter.)  Recently, I received one untypical email three times.  Initially, the email caught my attention with the sales pitch of, "...this would be a great story for Vinsanity."  Okay.  The email, introducing a Canadian company called Sproutly, extolled the virtues of, "the world's only water-soluble cannabis solution" and asked if I would be interested in speaking with Sproutly's CEO.  Erm, no!  The only mood-altering beverage that I am interested in is wine.
Old hippies (underachievers, hedonists, common or garden losers...), in their pot-induced delirium, ascribe all sorts of miraculous attributes to weed, marijuana, pot, grass, ganga, dope, Mary Jane, etc.  Call it what you will, by any other name, cannabis is a psychoactive drug with behavioural and health ramifications.  Besides, the fact is that old hippies just smell like skunk.  And although I like the skunk as an animal, beats me why anyone would voluntarily want to stink like one.
I don't see anything hypocritical in my enjoying a glass of wine now and again, with food, and friends (and as a necessity of my job), compared to someone whose preference is to get stoned.  I personally know of a couple of people who get inebriated in this way all day long, calling it 'recreation'.  Well, I could drink all day long, but that would be called, and rightly so, 'alcoholism'.
Old hippies never die, they just smell worse by the day.

Almost famous.

I had totally forgotten all about being asked to write a review for Making Your Own Mead.  Then recently, whilst I was looking for an unrelated email, I came across the original email with the request for a review of what, I still think, is a great little book.  I had furnished a quick review after reading the book last April, then heard no more.  I don't consider myself a particularly good writer, so I had no expectations of Fox Chapel Publishing using my brief write-up.  However, curiosity piqued, I hopped over to Amazon and did a quick search.
Lo and behold, there it was, my review, in all its black and white glory.  Upon showing my published vino-critique to Vinomaker, he just laughed and said, "Quintessential Vinogirl."  Hey!  I resemble that remark.

Chips and spread.

Yes, here it is, the obligatory, annual, first pile-of-prunings photograph.  I managed to finish pruning Vinoland's table-grapes today.  It took me a whopping 10 minutes to prune the remaining two vines.  I was exhausted afterwards, hee, hee.  The pruning of the table grapes created a small pile of vine-prunings, small enough that I could probably pick the whole thing up quite readily with both arms.
It's a completely different story when I get to the wine-grapes. 
It still amazes me, each and every year, how much vegetative-material the vines produce.  It's a viticultural miracle that nutrients in the soil combined with water and sunshine can create so much vegetation, shoots and leaves galore.  (Well, pruning determines the number of shoots, but Mother Nature dictates shoot-length.)  And clusters of grapes on top of that.
Of course, all that pruned wood needs to be disposed of.  The Napa Valley Grape Growers outline, in their Best Practices, an online educative resource, the four main ways of disposing of prunings; chop and disc; chop and cover crop; chip with a chipper; burn like billy-o.  (I predict, in the not so distant future that burning will be banned outright in the Napa Valley, even though it is the most efficient way of disposing of grapevine material.)  In Vinoland, we chip and spread - a practice that works best for our modest vineyard operation - returning all that vegetative matter back to the ground from whence it came.

The party's over.

Yes, it is time to return to reality; time for the party muselets to be thrown away; time for the New Year.
On the whole, I've been having a pretty slow start to 2019.  I did, sort of, start pruning today - one table-grapevine to be exact - before it began to rain.  Gotta start somewhere, titter, titter.  One vine at a time.
The weather has been quite damp this January and it has cramped my outdoors-style significantly.  I have, however, had time to read several books so it hasn't been a total loss.  And it's not like the vineyard is going anywhere.  I'll get to wherever I'm going, eventually.

The 2019 routine.

Humiliate the dog, walk through the vineyard, hang up my 2019 calendar (a complimentary calendar that comes with my subscription to American Vineyard magazine).  Wow!  It's 2019 already, how did that happen?  Next year we'll be out of the teens, crazy.
My immediate 2019 routine, well, starting pretty soon, will consist of pruning, training and other vineyard operations.  I have at least a dozen vines that need replanting due to them being dead, or dying.  And two end posts that have died and need replacing.  All fun stuff.
A happy 2019 to all!