The End of End Post Pounding!

Here is what we are thankful for: That we have friends who are generous enough to loan us their post pounder and we have friends who generously give their time to help us. We have now put in our 72 end posts, 36 on each end of the field. And as Murphy's Law would have it, the penultimate post made us use our back hoe to dig a hole to remove a burial of stones before we could put the post in.
But, it is done!

2010 Les Granges Paquenesses Savagnin

Recently, my husband opened this bottle of white wine and challenged a few friends and me to identify the grape. I thought that I immediately detected a little bit of oxidation. My friend identified citrus notes. We pondered about the grape variety. Then my husband made it a little easier for us, "New World or Old World", he said. Still puzzled. In the end, we gave up. We would never have guessed that we were drinking a grape variety called Savagnin.
This bottle of wine came as part of a one case booty sent to us by Warren Leonard, assistant manager at Weygandt Wines in Washington, D.C. My husband asked Warren to select a few wines from their inventory, consisting of 8 reds and 4 whites including a few bottles of Pinot blanc with the average price per bottle being under $30.00. We have been tasting through the case of a few eclectic wines including this one.
I looked on line to learn a bit more about the 2010 Les Granges Paquenesses Savagnin. The savagnin grape is used in wines made in the Jura region of France, a cool climate wine region located between Burgundy and Switzerland. Loreline Laborde is the winemaker at Les Granges Paquenesses. Her winemaking style is pure and rustic, working everything with her hands and her horse! I'm glad that Warren rounded out our case of wine with this savagnin, any time we can expand our knowledge of the world of wines, I'm in.

End Post Pounding Help in the Vineyard

We had the help of our friend for two days and it is amazing how many more posts we can get into the ground with the help of one more person! On the first day, the weather was quite beautiful, but on the second day, the winds were howling and it was bitter cold so he was quite the trooper to hang in there and help us. We were out there again today and without the howling wind, 40 degrees can be quite bearable!
While we were working, we saw in broad daylight, 3 deer sauntering and grazing at the north end of our vineyard. We called our friend who hunts our land to let him know about our siting. I was able to catch two of the three intruders on my camera.

Spotted Lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula)

A few days ago, our friend sent us a link to a new grape pest that has been seen in Pennsylvania. Once you know where to look, information about the Spotted Lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) can be found everywhere on the Internet. This particular article says that the spotted lanternfly can impact industries ranging from lumber to wine.
The adults and nymphs of the spotted lanternfly feed on phloem tissues of foliage and young stems with their piercing and sucking mouthparts and excrete large quantities of liquid. This excreted liquid is high in sugar content that can harbor mold growth, which could hinder plant growth or even cause death.
Knowing the life cycle of the spotted lanternfly is helpful in trying to identify the insect and limit their damage. I put together this life cycle diagram from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture article on the Spotted Lanternfly.

The adult form of the spotted lanternfly is rather beautiful:

2011 Joseph Drouhin Macon-Villages

Recently, my husband made a recipe that he found on the Wine Berserker Forum called Monkfish Saltimbocca This is his new favorite recipe because it was easy to make and delicious! He took some major liberties with the recipe because he wasn't able to find monkfish so he used hake and instead of parma or serrano ham, he used prosciutto. Then we paired the dish with this 2011 Joseph Drouhin Macon-Village. Yes, this white burgundy (Chardonnay) was only $10.99 and it was a delicious accompaniment to the fish. There was a very nice integration of wood oak in the Chardonnay that provided the appropriate mouth feel and flavors to stand up to the prosciutto. We need to find more of this Joseph Drouhin Macon-Village and try the Monkfish Saltimbocca again, soon!

Days of Pounding End Post

It is getting toward the end of the season and winter is quickly approaching (tomorrow! according to the weather forecasters). We are finally getting our black locust end posts in the ground, with the help of an Extreme Driver post pounder, a loaner from our generous friends. To fill in a little background, we spent a lot of time looking for black locust that we could use for our end posts because we didn't want to use the conventional pressure treated end posts that contain CCAs (i.e. chromated copper arsenate). After a lot of searching, my husband located a dealer in Barkhamsted, CT who provided us with 90, reasonably straight 10 foot posts. We were ecstatic!
Taking the advice of our friend, "Start from a place where you can experiment on how to use the pounder", translation "Make your mistakes where not too many people can see", on Tuesday morning, we started at the north end of our field, with our first try. It took us 2 hours to put in our first black locust end post. The major hurdle was how to position the black locust that was so dense, it felt like concrete, into the clamping device of the post pounder.

We went home to regroup and think about how to speed this task up. So, on the drive home, my husband was mumbling to me something about modifying the fork lift on the John Deere so that he could put a chain on the plate. All this talk about forks and plates was making me think of how hungry I was for lunch. (Focus Gayle, focus!) He also wanted to know how much each end post might weigh, so my husband looked on the Internet and found the answer. Here is what Wikipedia had to say about black locust:.

Wood: Pale yellowish brown; heavy, hard, strong, close-grained and very durable in contact with the ground. The wood has a specific gravity 0.7333, and a weight of approximately 45.7 pounds per cubic foot.

If we were paying attention, the statistic approximately 45.7 pounds per cubic foot, should have jumped out at us. We purchased 10 foot long locust posts with diameters ranging from 6-8 inches. So, dusting off my middle school math with a little help from the internet on how to calculate the volume of a cylinder, I calculated how much an average log of black locust might weigh and came up with 157.8 pounds!

The fortunate thing is that we do have 2 tractors. My husband took the forks out of the John Deere fork lift and hooked up a chain to the "plate" in order to move the log into place. This modification worked like a charm and we are now down to approximately 45 minutes per post!

2004 Jacky Truchot Clos Sorbes Burgundy with Roasted Stuffed Chicken

We have had a Jacky Truchot Les Blanchards Burgundy before in 2012 and enjoyed it then. This 2004 Clos Sorbes wine is still drinking wonderfully, full of fruit and a hint of spice. My husband retrieved this wine from the basement stash because I made a mushroom and sausage stuffed breast of chicken with a light mushroom sauce. It is very rare that I make a meal like this so I believe that my husband thought it was cause for celebration. I paired the chicken with oven roasted baby purple potatoes, baby carrots, and baby beets which all came from my garden and store bought onions. I have to confess, I roasted the chicken for far too long and it was a tad dry. But drinking copious amounts of Jacky Truchot Morey-St.-Denis was the right fix!

Temperature Report from Onset HoboWare

We went to the land yesterday afternoon and downloaded the data on our Onset Hoboware Temperature logger that we deployed on October 19th. We knew that we had a hard frost on the 20th of October, but we didn't know exactly what time and what temperature it was. We just knew that our grape leaves took a beating from the cold.
We set the device to measure and record data every ten minutes. So, the software associated with the temperature logger plotted the data like this:

All three of our data loggers trended in the same way:

In addition, I was able to look at all of the data and locate exactly when the coldest temperature occurred and what that temperature was. So, our three data loggers recorded the following low temperatures:

Logger 1	Logger 2	Logger 3
10/20 6:58 AM 28.139oF	10/20 6:32 AM 26.458oF	10/20 6:30 AM 26.245oF
11/03 7:18 AM 28.969oF	11/03 6:52 AM 27.930oF	11/03 6:45 AM 32.617oF

And the high temperatures occurred at these times:

Logger 1	Logger 2	Logger 3
10/21 3:28 PM 82.508oF	10/21 2:32 PM 78.624oF	10/21 3:30 PM 78.624oF
10/29 3:18 PM 83.399oF	10/29 1:32 PM 78.274oF	10/29 3:05 PM 78.098oF

The high temperatures seem a little too high in our opinion. We currently have our temperature sensors attached to our metal line posts and that might be creating a micro-environment due to radiant heating. So we are thinking about putting the sensors into a more neutral environment using PVC piping.

Vineyard Cleaning Detail

Yesterday, we finished cutting the scions off of the many (6300+) vines that did not make it through the 2013 season so that we could distinguish between the plants that are still remaining (500) when it comes time for pruning next spring.
You might ask, "Why are we keeping dead vines?" and the answer would be:
We are working with our Farm Service Agency (FSA) and have applied for a grant that would provide some financial assistance in replacing our vines. The reason for keeping these dead vines is that they may want to see the devastation.
So, on an unseasonably beautiful day, as we walked the rows lopping as we went along, we came across little green specks on an otherwise dead vine and upon closer inspection, found these:

Apparently, the hole left by the disappearance of the pith is a great home to these little green caterpillars. My husband cut a cane and found 3 of these little fellows huddled there for the winter. All the more reason to do vineyard cleaning!
I haven't figured out what these caterpillars are, but if you know what they might be, please drop me a line!

2009 Vajra Barolo

My husband purchased this 2009 Vajra Barolo because we are fans of Vajra wines and especially their 2009 Barbera d'Alba Superior. This Barolo did not disappoint! We enjoyed this wine which we paired with a Moussaka me Patates that we made with eggplant grown in our garden. Sadly, the days of fresh produce from the garden is coming to an end as our Indian summer has abruptly given way to winter.
The memory of the deliciousness of the wine is keeping me warm this Sunday morning as snow falls to the north of us, reminding me of the unseasonable snowfall we had on October 29, 2011.