2019 Planting Vines

This is the third (hopefully final) year that we will be replanting the vines that died in the original planting that we did in 2013. To recap how our vines died, please check out my blogpost: 90% at the School of Hard Knocks. The thing about custom grafted vines is that it takes 18 months to reorder them. Once we knew in 2014 that 90% of our vines were dead and we placed an order, it took until 2016 to get in the replacement vines.
We had to consider how we would replant the vines when the trellis wire was already in place. Looking on the internet, my husband found videos of people using a mini-track steer with an auger to dig holes. Here are the blogposts I wrote in 2016 when we were anticipating our 6,000 vines.

• April 21, 2016 Trepanning with the Dingo
• May 13, 2016 Preparing the Staging Area for Planting
• May 14, 2016 More Planting Preparations
• May 15, 2016 Planting Day 1
• May 19, 2016 6 Days 30 People 4200 Vines

It turned out that when the vines were ready to be shipped, instead of 6,000 vines, we were shipped 4,200 vines. So the remaining 1800 vines were cued up to be shipped to us in 2017. This is what we did in 2017:

• May 3, 2017 The Vines are Here
• May 6, 2017 Planting Day
• May 9, 2017 Vintage 2017: Planting Time

It is already Tuesday, May 21! Planting is done! But here is what we did to get there. As in previous years, we used a mini-skid steer fitted with an auger bit. This year, the mini-skid steer was the best that we had rented in our three of experience with the mini-skid steer. The track was smaller and the auger bit was sharp! We drilled the holes on Wednesday, May 15 and Thursday, May 16th on the two days that it didn't rain!

Our friends came to help us this past weekend and over Saturday, May 18th and Sunday, May 19th. Saturday was a beautiful day and our friends helped us to plant all of the Barbera into the pre-dug holes and one row of the Auxerrois, again in pre-dug holes before we called it a day.
We had a bit more work to do on Sunday, two half rows of Auxerrois. After that got done our friends also helped us to take the dead vines from the Cabernet Sauvignon (5 dead), Cabernet Franc (2 dead) and Barbera (3 dead) and replant those dead vines with vines from our nursery.

We managed to plant approximately 600 vines of Barbera and Auxerrois in those two days.
With the exception of half a row of Auxerrois, our vineyard is back to the original planting of 6800 vines. In the process of replanting the vineyard, we decreased the amount of Chardonnay rows and planted test rows of Cabernet Sauvignon ENTAV clone 412, Cabernet Franc ENTAV clones 214 and 327 and Barbera. It appears to us that the Cabernet Franc really loves the site. Chardonnay and Cabernet Franc are both at this growth phase of 4-5 leaves separated (Eichhorn Lorenz stages 11-12) right now.