Bird Damage and Wedding Bags in the Vineyard

While we were busy with putting in the irrigation, there were things that got pushed down the list of thing to do, such as cluster counting. Cluster counting is not an onerous thing, it just needs to get done. Our friend Mary, came by on August 2 so that we could have some idea of how much netting we needed to order. Last year, we had our first, very small crop of grapes and we ordered a netting called tightlock, from our supplier. It worked perfectly to keep out even little insects.

So, after Mary counted all of the grape clusters that she could see, my husband called our supplier to order the netting. We then got some very bad news, our supplier was all out of tightlock netting. We should not be surprised since this type of order should really be placed much earlier than the middle of August. We were in a quandry, what to do, what to do. Then, we remembered that on one of the forums that my husband belongs to, there is a grape grower in Japan who bags all of their grapes. We decided that we could do that for our grapes as well, so my husband went on line to check out how much these bags would cost. It was little cost prohibitive for the 1000 or so clusters that we have. Ever the resourceful person, my husband looked up wedding organza bags and we decided to go with wedding bags in the vineyard.
We ordered 1000 wedding organze bags about 10 days ago. Our son was here this weekend so we put him to work.

Most of our Chenin blanc are around 8 ^oBrix or so. But some of our Chenin blanc grapes are at 16 ^oBrix! It's a little early this year, compared to last year when we saw turkeys eating our grapes, this year, we are seeing bird damage. With our son's help, we were able to bag almost half of the Chenin blanc grape clusters.