Pregnant pause.

It's been a while: I've been busy.  My absence, whilst not as lengthy as a real pregnancy, has seen a good deal of fruitfulness - out in the vineyard.  My babies are looking good.  Pictured here is a cluster of Cabernet sauvignon grapettes.  Fruit set looks great, weather conditions have been favourable and there doesn't seem to be much evidence of shatter.  I always feel a sense of achievement at fruit set, but especially when the set looks as good as it does this season.  I am aware that a lot of crazy stuff can still happen between now and harvest, but I've been doing this for a while now and I feel confident saying that 2019 looks like it's going to be a really good vintage.

Green, green grapes of home.

The weather has turned hot, finally!  We have had three days of mid 90s temps.  I'm loving it, but the grapes probably aren't as enthusiastic about it as I am.  So, to make the little grapettes feel better, they have been treated to their first watering of the season.
Watering the vines is not as easy as just turning on a tap, of course, nothing is that straight forward.  The vineyard drip irrigation lines have to be flushed of any deposits that may have collected in the lines over the previous growing season - deposits that could clog the emitters.  In Vinoland, the main culprit is the iron bacteria that is in our well water. The intense orange colouration of the water that blasts out of the end of the lines, (always my end of the line, Vinomaker is always upstream), is fantastic.  Stay hydrated, little grapies!

California calyptra.

It rained today; heavy at times, but mostly a miserable, stubborn drizzle that lasted all-the-grey-day-long.  And the temperature climbed to a whopping 65° F.   Hmmph!  Not exactly optimum conditions for bloom in the grapevines - which seems to be going quite slowly this year. Come back, California-sunshine.
The number of days that the grapevines are in bloom is dependent upon the weather.  When conditions are favourable bloom can take about 8-10 days, (but it can take as long as two weeks under cool conditions like the Napa Valley is experiencing now).  And, of course, the flower clusters on a grapevine will not all bloom at exactly the same time, so that spreads bloom out a bit.  Still, I think bloom is more protracted this year.  I have also noticed that there are more clusters per shoot and that the clusters seem to be a bit bigger than the past two years.
Do not be alarmed by this picture of detached grape flowers from one cluster of Cabernet Sauvignon at TWWIAGE (and hand-modeled by a coworker).  Although it looks like a lot of dead material; anthers, calyptra, stamens, etc., it is quite normal.  As few as 20 to 30 percent of the flowers on a cluster will develop into berries, most will fall from the cluster during the initial stages of berry growth.  Furthermore, a significant number of flowers will drop from the cluster about 8 to 12 days after full bloom: a stage commonly known as shatter.  Fruit set is not complete until after shatter.  Phew!  It's a jungle out there.  Fruit, set, now!

Midyear report.

It's the 1st of July already, wow!  Everything in the vineyard looks good. Fruit set in the Syrah, Cabernet sauvignon and Pinot grigio vines looks normal.  The berries are small and hard - still more than a full month away from the onset of veraison.  The past 12 days of toasty weather were not quite hot enough to end the risk of infection from powdery mildew. High temperatures can harm the fungus, but only two days got over 95° F, so sulphur applications will still be necessary for a little while yet.  All in all, I'm pretty pleased with this growing season.  So far, so good.

Young wine?

A very young 2015 vintage, tee hee.  All the grapevines in Vinoland got off to a very good start this spring and for the most part flowering is now at an end.  Fruit set in the Pinot grigio looks fabulous and I'm very happy with how things are progressing.  I still have lots of shoot-stuffing to do in the Cabernet sauvignon vines, but after that things in the vineyard will slow down quite considerably and I'll have a bit of time to myself.  Until it's time to start the next vineyard operation, or two.

Foregiveness is the vine.

There is not a lot going on in the vineyard right now, just the usual bits and bobs; wayward shoots to stuff, young vines to train and adventitious growth to nip in the bud. 
I still have some replanting to do, however.  A week ago, I drove over to Novavine, a grapevine nursery in Sonoma, to pick up some green-growing Cabernet Sauvignon (clone 337) bench grafts, but I've been a bit too busy to do anything with them.  And now it is forecast to be 100°F, or higher, for the next few days - not exactly ideal planting temperatures.  But in they must go.
Overall, I am happy with the growing season thus far.  Fruit set in all four of Vinoland's grape varieties looks good.  I'm a little surprised at how advanced the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes are, despite my almost calamitous timing as to exactly when to begin pruning this year.  Apparently the vines have forgiven me.

Cruise control.

Things are coming along swimmingly in the vineyard; flowering is continuing nicely and fruit set in the Pinot grigio vines looks good, little intervention is needed right now. It's just as well really, as I had a really busy weekend and couldn't devote too much time to the vineyard.

On Friday, my TWWIAGE co-workers and I went to an Oakland A's game. It was a long night, but lots of fun was had by all. Saturday evening found Vinomaker and I at BottleRock 2014, with about 30,000 other music enthusiasts, enjoying the second iteration of this local music event. We enjoyed ourselves, but it meant another late night for me.
Around noon on Sunday I finally got out in the vineyard, but I wasn't there for very long. What I can only assume was a very mild bout of norovirus literally knocked me off my feet for 48 hours. I never get sick, so this was a bit of a shock to me. I thought norovirus was something people usually contracted on cruise ships, sheesh! I'll think twice about partying with 30,000 peeps the next time the opportunity arises, I'd have been safer in the vineyard.

Fruit set: Pinot grigio.

With a diameter of about 4 mm, these baby Pinot grigio grapes seem to be really enjoying Napa's favourable, for grape-growing, climatic conditions - definitely over those of 2011.  Fruit set, aided by dry weather during bloom, looks great.  The 2012 vintage looks promising, so far.
Funny, suddenly I feel like a glass of Pinot grigio.

Infanticide.

This is not a bowl of peas, it is some of the first crop of Pinot gris grapes from Vinoland's most recent expansion. Lovely looking berries - nice fruit set, good yield, no powdery mildew - all torn from the caring embrace of their mother vine's canopy and tossed onto the harsh, dry vineyard floor. (I can get a bit dramatic sometimes, forgive me.) It does seem a shame to discard such healthy young grapes, but it a necessary step in the development of new vines where the focus needs to be on encouraging leaf and root growth. Actually, I should have performed this vineyard operation a lot earlier, when the clusters were flowers not fledgling grapes, but as usual I'm a bit behind with stuff. Better late than never!

April (and May) showers bring June grapes.

They are flower clusters no more: there are now actual grape clusters amongst the canopy.

Fruit set looks great, especially in the Syrah vines. The Orange muscat fruit set though is an altogether different matter. It appears that there is a significant amount of shatter in the Orange muscat, which unfortunately means fewer berries at harvest time.