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!

Overjoyed.

Whilst working in the Pinot grigio (PG) this morning, stuffing shoots, I looked down and found an old earring of mine.  Why I looked down I do not know.  Stuffing shoots is definitely looking up through the canopy sort of work.  I am overjoyed to say the least.
I'd given up all hope of finding this earring.  I was fairly sure that it had dropped out whilst I was leaf-pulling in the PG block (almost 2 years ago).  But I had been in a vineyard that was being developed/ripped that day also, so when I noticed my earring was missing I wasn't 100% sure exactly where it had vacated my earlobe.  I looked along the rows a million times.  I contemplated buying a metal detector.  I decided the earring was a lost cause, I despaired.  They were very special earrings: Thud had bought them for me one Christmas and I wore them at my wedding to Vinomaker.  I was devastated.
Two weeks ago, I spent a whole week hoeing/hand weeding the PG block, so I had cleared a fair bit of real estate under the vines.  Didn't see a thing.  Then today, purely by chance, eureka!  None the worse for wear, just covered in Coombsville clay, I am really surprised that my filigree hoop hadn't been squashed by a tractor.  Vinomaker reckons the chickens unearthed my earring (the girls are wherever I am in the vineyard, I'm sure they think I'm the best chicken-scratcher out there).  But methinks my new guardian angel had something to do with me striking gold in the vineyard.  Thanks, mum!

Thwap!

I have spent a lot of time in the vineyard since I returned to California: I am paying for going on holiday during the spring bud break-bacchanalia.
The weather in Vinoland continues to be unusually cool which has been a bit of a boon as whilst I was away the vines have had a bit of a slower start to the growing season.  There is no evidence, as yet, of flowering in the Orange muscat (OM), or the Pinot grigio.  Flowering was retarded in 2018, so I'm expecting 2019 to be late also.  However, it's not as if the grapevines were dormant in my absence, there is plenty of growth for me to deal with.
The OM is more than a little unruly, I was positively slapped silly as I struggled to stuff the recalcitrant shoots into the trellis wires. I'm not a wimpy person, but at one point I almost felt that if I got thwapped in the face one more time I was going to burst into tears.  It hurt!
Whilst I'm not saying a grapevine has the ability to bear malice (even with my proclivity to be a tad anthropomorphic), I do feel I was being severely reprimanded for my dereliction of viticultural-duty.  Ouch.

Surging Syrah.

Erm, wow!  Apparently, I have been spending too much of my vineyard-time in amongst the Cabernet sauvignon (CS) vines.  For most of the past two weeks I have been stuffing CS shoots like a mad woman.  This time of year the CS gets to the stage where it can get a little unruly.  If not for a little good-natured encouragement, and gentle coaxing of the shoots into the trellising wires, the vines would soon resemble Cousin Itt.  I hadn't noticed that the Syrah vines were about 95% finished with flowering and there are BB-sized grapettes.  Oops.
The 2018 growing season, thus far, has seen bloom in the white and the black grapes much closer together timing-wise than it would be in a typical year: the flowering window has been effectively shortened.  It's all good as it is these kind of differences that make a vintage.

The old and the new.

New Cabernet sauvignon leaves, old Cabernet sauvignon tendrils.
Vinoland's grapevines are enjoying a fantastic start to the 2017 growing season.  All four grape varieties are flourishing right now; lots of vigour in the vines, so lots of shoot stuffing for me to perform.
The weather has been a bit up and down, mid 90°s last week, mid 60°s the past two days.  I hope we are not going to have another cool growing season like that of 2011.  Only time will tell.

¡Trabajadores del mundo, uníos!

Happy May Day!  By which I mean a cheerful May Day to all, but only in the ancient-spring-festival-laudatory-way of celebrating the first day of May.  I love a bit of paganism now and again.
Yes, it is spring and, like me, Vinoland's grapevines are suitably enthused.  I spent most of the past four days making sure that the new, rapidly elongating shoots are securely tucked up behind the trellis wires. I love viticulture.  I love farming the grapevines in Vinoland, but, at this stage in my life, I wouldn't want to pursue viticulture as a full time job. Things, and people, change.
TWWIAGE is in the process of hiring a viticulturist.  The vacancy was just posted on Winejobs.com.  It is a new position, as TWWIAGE has never had a dedicated viticulturist before.  Instead, the owners of TWWIAGE went the traditional route of employing a vineyard manager who oversees all things grapey.  But things change.
I would not be an eligible candidate for the job. Neither would my young coworker, The Doodler, who is in the process of working his way through UC Davis and has designs on making a career out of viticulture. Why? Well, The Doodler, like me, doesn't speak Spanish and, furthermore, has no particular desire to learn Spanish.  But speaking Spanish is a requirement of being considered qualified to perform the job of viticulturist.  As The Doodler commented, in wry observation, "California [Napa] is the only place where one has to learn a foreign language in order to get a job in one's own country."  Thought provoking.

To bloom betimes.

I think 2016 is going to be an unusual vintage.  I say this because today, whilst I was out in the vineyard stuffing shoots, I noticed that Vinoland's Cabernet sauvignon (CS) is further along in bloom than the CS at TWWIAGE.
It is fun to live (and farm) in a relatively cool AVA e.g., Coombsville and work (and observe) in another, noticeably warmer AVA e.g., Oakville. And why do I consider this year's earlier bloom, in spite of a cooler-than-normal spring, unusual?  Because from my personal experience, CS, Clone 4, in Coombsville is normally a bit of a slowcoach in the flowering department.  This year my little mutants apparently want to get an early start.  Go little girls and boys!

Slowing down.

I'm not slowing down, nor apparently is this common garden snail (Cornu aspersum) who, along with his pals, keeps popping up in the Syrah vines (not in the garden).  It is the grapevines themselves that are slowing down. The grand period of growth - a period of time when the shoots of vigorous grape varieties can elongate as much as an inch or more a day - is almost at an end.  During bloom the rapid shoot growth slows; in part due to competition for the allocation of photosynthates; in part because of hormone and enzyme activity in the flowering vine.  But also because May has been an unseasonably cool month.  The California May Grey has also retarded development a little bit, as the weather has been rather chilly and thus the vines have not been quite as enthused.

Me?  I haven't been able to slow down yet.  As quickly as the vines have been putting on vegetal growth, I've been busy tidying the over-zealous shoots by tucking them behind the trellis wires. The snail?  Well, his departure into the blackberry thicket, facilitated by me, was anything but slow.