Drip, drop, dribble.

I spent the entire day up close and personal with every single vine in Vinoland.  Tomorrow the vineyard is being sulphured so I needed to get all the shoots stuffed up under the trellis.  I also spent some time removing some laterals in the fruit zone.  Wow, there seems to be plenty of extra vigour this season.  All that surplus greenery just gets in the way of where the sulphur needs to go, so it was, "Off with their heads!"  It's okay, they don't feel a thing.
The vines also got their first watering of the year.  That meant checking every emitter, two for each vine, to make sure that they weren't clogged up with gunk.  All in all not bad, only a handful needed to be replaced which is much better than some past years.  The recycled water we are now using is much easier on the emitters than Vinoland's well water.
Drink up kids!

Water works.

I think I may have mentioned it already, but this has been a relatively cool spring.  It is, however, forecast to be more than a tad toasty for the next several days.  Just in time for the summer solstice.  Yay!
With warm weather imminent, Vinomaker decided that it was time the vines got a little water, starting with the Syrah up on the hill (always the first to show a little stress).  But first we had to perform one particular vineyard operation - the clearing of the irrigation lines.
As I waited (at the end of a Syrah row) for Vinomaker to give me the go ahead to open the small, inline ball valve at the end of the line, I noticed a winsome little moss: the conversely named Largetooth Calcareous Moss (Mnium spinulosum), growing on a leaky pressure gauge. It made me smile.  Mother Nature is great.

Rust never sleeps.

Rust never sleeps?  Neither do I this time of year, or at least it feels like that.  Today, Vinomaker and I decided to clean out the irrigation lines: it was time for the grapevines to get their first watering of the season.
Each row in the vineyard has its own irrigation line and each line has a cap and valve at the end. Working at either end of the rows, Vinomaker and I flushed water through each of the lines to clear out anything that may have accumulated in the lines since the vines were last watered in October of last year.  (Also, every emitter along the irrigation lines are checked for blockages and replaced if necessary.)  And because we are on a well in Vinoland, the accumulation-culprit is always ferrous iron.  Well, the water in the lines was ferrous (completely dissolved) when it went in, but, as you can see in the photograph, it comes out as ferric (no longer dissolved).  Hello, oxidation.
Making up about 5% of the earth’s crust, iron is one of the earth’s most common elements. Although present even in city/tap water, iron is seldom found at concentrations greater than 10 mg/l.  As little as 0.3 mg/l can cause water to turn a rusty colour.  But it's a great colour.  
The Pinot grigio vines didn't care about the colour of the water, they just enjoyed their long, cool drink.