July Rains Hasten Hedging Duties

July has brought a heat wave into our area of Connecticut and it has also brought lots of rain! What does heat and rain do to a vineyard? This is the jungle that happened seemingly overnight:

We are trying to beat back the jungle by hedging and shoot tucking. This is a view of our efforts. I call it the "park view":

Yesterday afternoon while we were busy working in the vineyard, our granddaughter noticed this ominous sign of rain. We gathered our things and skedaddled out of the vineyard, put our tools away and went home!

Vineyard Sightings

We had been having mornings with a lot of condensation so here are some cool pictures. Here is a picture of a spider web with morning dew:

Who knew that tendrils had hairs?:

2019 Domaine Armand Heitz Saint-Romain Combe Bazin

We had our friends over for dinner and my husband made his speciality, ballontine chicken. I made wild rice and we were gifted with the best snow peas grown by our neighbors, which we tossed into a pot of boiling water for just a few minute and added a touch of butter. What more could a dinner want?
My husband brought out this 2019 Domaine Armand Heitz Saint-Romain Combe Bazin which surprised our palates. We really enjoyed this delicious white burgundy so more research on it was in order.

I found the Armand Armand Heitz Website where I learned about the history of the ownership of the land in Burgunday. Currently, they farm their land with environmental sustainability to create a harmonious and sustainable ecosystem. The pictures on their website is very picturesque and I found myself wanting to go there!

Chardonnay Recovery from May Frost Damage

In preparation for this blogpost, I was looking back at the blogpost on June 2, Vintage 2023: June Doings, in that posting were photos of the Chardonnay rows that we were working on showing all of the dead young shoots that we were removing, the after effects of the mid-May frost.
Fast forward three weeks and the Chardonnay amazingly look like this:

On July 4th, we were busy shoot tucking, shoot removal and cleaning the graft union where all kinds of tiny shoots have decided to bud out! We are encouraged with the Chardonnay's desire to grow because that means that next year, we will have some nice fruiting canes. We are also seeing berryset in the Chardonnay which is another encouraging sign.

However, with every day that passes, the shoots grow taller, making the shoot tucking a bit more difficult and the lowering of the netting to the lowest slot on our linepost even more imperative. So far, we (our friends) have lowered the netting on 4 of the 8 rows of Chardonnay, with four more rows to go.
Meanwhile, my husband is busy with weeding our 36 rows of vines. Unlike in the past where he was using his hand held weeder to weed our vineyard, the purchase of the Fischer Twister has facilitated this job. So, unlike the month he took to hand weed whack the vineyard, with the Fischer twister, the weeding goes so quickly that within 2 days, he only has 7 more rows to weed.
These incremental advances in how we do vineyard work is helping us but this is the time of the year that Mother Nature blesses us with hot and humid work days! This is farming!

Vintage 2023: July Shoot Tucking Tasks

Happy Fourth of July!
We have finished shoot tucking, shoot thinning and cleaning our graft union to allow air flow into the growing canopy in the Auxerrois.

We also lowered the netting in the lowest slot on our linepost so that the growing vines do not entwine their tendrils into the netting. We have learned this lesson the hard way. Whenever we didn't have the time to put the netting on the lowest slot on the linepost, the tendrils entwine themselves into the netting making it very difficult to deploy the netting once veraison arrives. When we put the netting on the lowest slot, it is very easy to bring the netting up to the proper linepost slot and unfurl the netting to protect the ripening grapes.
Here is a photo of what we have done:

Now it is just a matter of doing this treatment for the rest of the vineyard.