Regrettable

The weekend, July 20 and 21 were extremely hot days, but being farmers, we can't really take a break. On Saturday, Bella helped to leaf pull our older Chardonnay vines. We were able to do 12 lineposts worth of leaf pulling when we called it quits at 11 a.m. because the feel-like temperatures with the humidity was 99 degrees!
On Sunday, my husband and I went to the vineyard at 6:30 a.m. On the way there, we noticed that our other farmer friends were already out in numbers tending to their fields. We are opening up the canopy by cutting any secondaries, but mostly large summer laterals.
I came upon one shoot that had a beautiful bunch of grapes and determined that there was a huge summer lateral that I could remove to open up the canopy. Much to my regret, the huge bunch of grapes was growing on the summer lateral! I actually downed two shoots with grapes as shown in the picture below on the left hand side. On the right hand side is a comparison of the large bunch I regrettably cut next to the dastardly instrument that did the deed.