Thu Apr 27 2023
The neighborhood frost fans came on at dawn once again to save the crops from certain failure. Yeah right. It was 38 on our thermometer. And oh, here comes the sun. Hmm. It is possible that freaky tendrils of freezing frost were attracted to the frigid steel towers of those frost fans. Hey, are frost fans in reality frost magnets? Insidious!
Speaking of frost, now 3 weeks on from the 20F overnight event that nipped away our Sangiovese buds (and I suspect a frost fan is useless at 20F except maybe the propane engine generated some localized heat?), but over in the Monastrell it's a different story. Take a gander at that monster baby cluster. Looking good there!
Busy times as the vineyard launches into greenery. Every day there is too much to do. Is that the definition of farming? It's 8am already and hardly a dent yet in the day's list of chores. And what are we doing? Planting more vines. Yes, we are crazy.
Wed Apr 19 2023
I'm thinking this track must be from a kick-ass gopher snake. Those things can get large and lumbery. Not to worry, they are friendlies. Days are consistently in the 70s and 80s now, even topped 90 one day, so the snakes are out. This is obviously a big boy and I hope it finds the entrance to our place and gobbles up some of those nasty ground squirrels.
This other snaky thing is Syrah tubing its way to another tank to leave lees behind and clarify some more in its new accommodations. One step closer to bottling. Yes it is rich and dark and you know, it's gonna be pretty good!
Update on the Sangiovese two weeks beyond that 20 degree night. See those buds leafing out at the bottom of the spur? Those are "basal" buds ("at the base" of the spur). A grapevine likes to grow from its outermost buds so this means those two or three buds further up on that spur are probably goners and the basal buds are in the outermost position now. There are backup buds behind those dead ones but will they sprout? Time will tell. Regardless, those basal buds and any backup buds won't produce much if any fruit.
Was that too professorial and boring? Sorry!
Tue Apr 11 2023
Mother Nature is always coming up with new challenges to throw at us. It's been a week since the deep freeze. Before the cold night, we had buds bursting out first leaves in the Sangiovese. Buds were swelling in some other varieties. The question is, which buds got nipped and which ones will survive?
It takes a few days for results to come in. The sequence of photos is Sangiovese the day of the 20F night, the morning after, and then the second day.
Day 1, the leading buds are obviously looking really happy. Day 2, those buds are discolored and sad. Day 3, the buds have collapsed.
The question is, that one bud at the bottom of the spur, the one that hadn't thrown out leaves yet, did it survive?
One week on now, it seems like that cold night put the vineyard back to sleep. Things just stopped. The vines stopped pushing water, the buds stopped swelling. Then yesterday, signs of waking again. It's the younger vines that wake up first. Buds pushing leaves again! Still early days but that's good to see.
Wed Apr 5 2023
NOAA does a really good job of pinpointing a forecast for our particular location. When we're staring down a cold night coming, NOAA typically starts off optimistic a few days out and steadily goes down from there. As for last night, NOAA was thinking we'd see 26 overnight and finally settled in at 22. Well, even that was optimistic. Our thermometer went to 20!
It could be we lost the larger part of the Sangiovese. It's looking like the leading buds are gone. The buds further down the spur might be OK but it's too early to tell.
Mon Apr 3 2023
Well, dangit, after that rant about frost fans, we are looking at going into the deep freeze tomorrow night and there's Sangiovese all happy and budding out. Mother Nature is sure something. The NOAA forecast started at 26 and those folks are typically optimistic at first. The latest forecast now is 22 degrees. I suspect frost fans won't save a vineyard from that low point on the thermometer. We're hopeful those buds survive. They are still pretty small and the smaller they are the hardier they are when the cold nights inevitably come. We'll irrigate the vine rows ahead of that temperature plunge and that will eat up some of the cold. Crossing our fingers!
Fri Mar 31 2023
Money to burn.
Folks so nervous and scared and they just gotta do something because they got money to burn!
On frost fans.
Come on at dawn at 39 degrees and run for an hour but the temperature will never get to freezing.
The sun is coming up you dopes!
Come on when the wind is blowing.
That won't do anything but burn more propane.
That fan can't blow everywhere all at once anyway don't you see that?
That frost is going to sneak in when you're looking the other way.
Come on for no good.
If it gets to 25 you're screwed no matter what.
That fan won't save you from that!!
You get the frost like everyone else.
If it gets to 27 you're probably ok anyway and the fan won't make a difference.
But you go buy that fan.
Sure go spend your money.
Wake up your neighbors.
What do you care?
You don't live here.
You don't live at the vineyard.
Sure open your wallet and burn that money.
Mon Mar 27 2023
In the Bugs of the Future category... The thing in this photo that looks like a dried up caterpillar, well, there was a time I didn't know what this was. At pruning time, they are easy to spot, and we'd find a few of them stuck to cordons and such. They looked buggy and scary so I detached one and gave it to Spotte. She sniffed it to verify it was food and then munched on it. She loved it! And she didn't die, so she got more.
One day my curiosity overcame me. I withheld one from Spotte and put it in a jar to see what would happen. Sometime later, there was a gazillions-strong army of teeny tiny nearly microscopic (and unhappy)… drum roll… praying mantises! Holy crap, those are good (beneficial) bugs! No more feeding those to Spotte!
At the other end of the season, we'll sometimes find a praying mantiss mother crawling around the grape clusters in the harvest bin. These ladies are big and waddly things carrying that huge egg case inside their bellies. And they are grumpy. Nevertheless, they are treated like royalty as they get walked straight back to a vine, glaring at their rescuer the whole way.
Fri Mar 24 2023
Things are waking up! Poppies and primroses everywhere. Found a sphinx moth on the wall this morning and it was a chilly one so the little thing stood quite still for the close-up. Oh, and the Sangiovese buds are swelling and whoa, a look at the forecast, 
we've got some freezing overnights ahead. Slow down, please!
We are waking up too, I mean earlier. The sun rises closer to 6am now and so do we. The vineyard calls!
Two barn owls have been coming by lately to visit the bins on our crush pad. They like one of the up-high picking bins so I put a pallet over it to cover it up but that just made it more agreeable to them. More porcelain poop everywhere. I turned on the 
overhead light all night long, hoping, but there they were waiting for me the next morning (with their backs to the light). Our little place is an owl magnet! I'm wishing we had an owl box out in the vineyard. Who knows, one might materialize.
Finished up pruning today, yay! Edward Scissorhands does about 90% of the vineyard and got his vines done a while ago. He's fast. We do one of the varieties ourselves. We're slow. Next up – get the babies tidied up and sheltered and hopefully they'll grow into adolescents this season.
Sun Mar 12 2023
That event last weekend was really good and such a nice break. When we got back to the vineyard, Spring had arrived. Days in the 70s, nights above freezing as far as the forecast reaches. Like flipping a switch, winter is over.
The vines are weeping. The scramble is on now to wrap up pruning ahead of bud break. Winery work is on the back burner now and will just have to wait until we catch up with the vineyard. It's just the way it is. The vineyard is the driver and it's what gets you up in the morning. (The winery wakes you up at night, if you know what I mean).
Layoffs are in the news. Tens of thousands of them. It's a tight job market these days so maybe a silver lining there and those folks might find new jobs soon. I was laid off just once, but it was in times when it meant months of job searching. I've also worked at places where layoffs were a regular quarterly thing. Morale was horrible. Those companies ate themselves up from the inside.
It's one of the reasons behind the vineyard. It checked one of the boxes. It is layoff proof. We live by our own wits.
It's a gorgeous morning, some amazing clouds, a little moisture in the air, fresh and chilly. We've got a few busy days ahead with prunings to push out into piles, mustard weeds to knock down, and granular to get down. I'll take this!
Thu Mar 02 2023
More snow! I'm thinking about putting Laura Ingalls Wilder's "The Long Winter" on my Kindle for perspective.
And I'm starting to feel the crunch! It's not my boots in the snow. It's when the vineyard needs more and more attention at the same time that the winery is demanding my time.
We spent a whole bunch of un-scheduled time and energy rounding up and burning or grinding up that blown-in tumbleweed (below).
The other big job now in the vineyard is to get pruning done ahead of the coming bud break. We get Edward Scissorhands out to do most of the pruning because he gets it done in just a few days and he's also smart about it (and that's important). Once those vines wake up, the craziness really gets going!
Bottling chores ramp up in the winery and that's going to be a distraction until sometime in May (sooner, if we're lucky).
We're off to another event this weekend to pour wine. It's looking like the weather will be pleasant and sunny (for a change) and it'll be a nice break from the chores!