Pinot grigio peekaboo.

The other day, during a friendly chat, the vineyard manager at TWWIAGE asked me if I had had any problems with fruit set this year. He mentioned to me that he'd noticed that there were a lot of "singles" in the Cabernet sauvignon vines, i.e., one cluster per shoot when there normally would be two. Nope, I hadn't noticed this particular phenomenon in Vinoland.  But then I have mostly been concentrating my suckering/shoot thinning and stuffing efforts in the Pinot grigio and the Syrah blocks.  I will be working in the Cabernet sauvignon tomorrow, so I will have a closer look.
This partial Pinot grigio cluster, caught up in the sinus of a leaf (a mini viticultural-hammock), seems to be following normal morphological progress, as does the entire vine.  There wouldn't be such a thing as a vintage if every growing season was the same.

Tendrils gone wild.

If any further evidence was needed to prove that a grape cluster is a modified tendril, here it is - one of several hundred morphing-into-mini-cluster-tendrils that were hanging about in the Cabernet Sauvignon canopy...y'know, flowering and stuff.  Well, they were until I cut them off in their prime. 
I spent the entire past weekend stuffing shoots under trellis wires and removing the aforementioned modified tendrils, along with any other opportunistic secondary fruit clusters (on lateral shoots).  I needed to get the vineyard whipped into shape before the rain, which was forecast for the next two days, appeared.  And rain it did, much more than I expected.  Rain this time of year is not at all detrimental to the grapevines, it really is just more of a nuisance.  And now, with all the shoots stuffed, Vinomaker can easily navigate the newly tamed rows to re-sulphur the vines and protect them from powdery mildew.

Love me tendril.

Now that the Orange muscat vines are at enough of an advanced stage that one can discern some distinct features of the grapevine, I thought I'd take a closer look at the various goings on at the tip of the new shoots.

In botany, plant morphology is the study of the specific forms and shapes of an organism.  A tenet of plant morphology is that there are three basic components of a higher plant (those having a vascular system); stem, leaf and root - all other plant structures are modifications of this trio of fundamental building blocks. Morphologically speaking Vitaceae, the family to which the grapevine belongs, is characterised by the occurrence of tendrils and inflorescences (both homologous organs) that emerge opposite leaves. The tendril of a grapevine is in actual fact a modified leaf whilst the inflorescence (or flower cluster) is a modified tendril.
The tendrils themselves are extremely interesting structures: pressure-sensitive modified leaves that reflect the climbing habit of the grapevine and occur in a repeating pattern (two on, one off) along the entire length of a shoot...blah, blah, blah!  It is the appearance of the modified tendrils, that usually form at the second and third position on a shoot, that I am most interested in and happy to see.  The modification of a tendril into a grapevine's flower cluster, and the successful pollination of those flowers, is the little miracle that translates into a future glass of wine.
Morph on little tendrils!

The perfect flower.

At last, in the Orange muscat block, the calyptra (covering the stamens and carpels) are brown and are beginning to be pushed off by the embryonic grape below. As is also the case in the Pinot gris block, the Cabernet sauvignon, and the Syrah.

In botany, the grape flower is indeed the perfect flower as it is hermaphroditic - containing both female and male reproductive parts. Let the flowering begin...whoo hoo!