Still shaking!

With new barrels arriving at TWWIAGE, in anticipation of the 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon harvest, wine-life goes on after a rather major earthquake.  Watching news coverage of the damage at certain wineries, (notably two crumpled-like-a-soda-can, 10,000 gallon, stainless steel tanks at the Hess Collection), I realise that TWWIAGE got off very lightly.  My employers only suffered the loss of a few cases of personal wine that were still stacked in cases, not unpacked and placed in the diamond shaped wine bins.  And Napa is still shaking.  Thud and his family got little sleep on Sunday night due to all the aftershocks.  I myself was awakened at 5.32 a.m. this morning by a small temblor, followed by another at 6.44 a.m.  California, man!

A day in the vineyard.

I have been drinking too much wine of late and have not been paying enough attention to the work of growing the grapes that become the wine. I remedied that a little today by doing some small jobs in the vineyard that could be put off no longer.
One small but necessary task was the removal of milk cartons that I had placed over vines this spring, vines that were field-budded last September, after determining if the grafted bud was viable. I then trained and tied each liberated young vine up a stake.
It looks like I will have about a dozen vines to field-bud this year. The demise of several of the vines seems to be gopher related. The other vines seem to have simply expired.