Vintage 2021: Summer Recap

Wow, summer went by in a hurry! We began June with a heat wave that occurred on June 5 and lasted until June 9th. At the end of June, most of our varieties had flowered and we were in the midst of shoot tucking the vines as they grew to the top catchwire.
July had our vineyard at berry formation. Our weather forecasters mentioned that we had 19 days out of 31 days of rain. All that rain had us struggling to keep up with the hedging as our vines grew to heights that we had never seen!

In August, we were finally able to catch our breath from hedging and move on to shoot tucking and lowering the netting wire to the position to enable us to net our ripening grapes. So far, we have been just a little ahead of the ripening curve in being able to net the varieties that will ripen first, the Auxerrois and the Chardonnay. Below is a photo of our netted Chardonnay. We use clothes pins to secure the bottom of the netting.

We begin the first of September with the remnants of hurricane Ida bringing us more rain.

After the rains are over we will head back into the vineyard to continue our work of netting our grapes, still hoping to stay ahead of the ripening curve!