Bugey-Cerdon Sparkling Wine

Recently, my husband opened this Bugey-Cerdon Sparkling Wine so that we could quench our thirst after a sweaty day of work in the vineyard. Delicious and refreshing are two words to describe this sparkling wine. It is imported by Kermit Lynch so I went to their website to read about Patrick Bottex.
Here is a short excerpt:
Patrick and Catherine Bottex have been farming the five hectares of limestone slopes above the Ain River since 1991.

Cerdon is one of three crus in the appellation of Bugey and is the only one whose entire production consists of sparkling wine. The Bottex’s blend consists of ninety percent Gamay and ten percent of the native Poulsard.
This sparkling is made using méthode ancestrale, a rare technique that experts believe predates the méthode champenoise. The wine first goes through a primary fermentation in cuve, but is then bottled before all of the residual sugar has converted to alcohol. After going through a secondary fermentation in the bottle for at least two months, the wine is ready to drink.
At just 8% alcohol, this is a very quaffable sparkling that my husband thinks will go well with Thai food. I'm game!

Rain, Rain, Everywhere But.....

It's pretty sad. We have had only 2 rain events during this spring season, once on April 20th that brought 3/4-inches of rain and another time on June 1st which gave us 1-1/4 inches of rain. There have been some pretty heavy rainstorms in Connecticut, but all of the storms seemed to go north of us or south of us. We could see the soil getting dry and dusty.
My husband said, "We gotta hoe around the vines", so we brought out our hook and crook hoe, our go-to hand weeder and began hoeing around our 8 rows of Chardonnay vines since they looked the most parched and then hoed around our Auxerrois. We filled our IBC tank with water from home and gave each vine a little thirst quencher. We did this on Saturday (June 12th) and then saw that rain was in the forecast for Monday. The probability was 100% so we breathe a sigh of relief.
Hoeing weeds is not always a drudgery (I lie), but if we were not doing manual labor, we probably would not have seen this beautiful butterfly that posed so nicely for a photo. Later, I learned from Pamm Cooper that this butterfly is called the Great Spangled Fritillary.

It's Monday and the promised rain has arrived! We are using this rain day to catch up on things left by the wayside for far too long.

Linepost Pounding Help in the Vineyard

I might have been stretching the truth just a little in my previous blog where I wrote about the Anatomy of an Endpost and said at the end that it has only taken us 3 years. The sentence implied that we were all done with the trellis system and the truth of the matter is we have 10 more rows of lineposts to put in. So, on Wednesday, we started with the first of the ten rows and it took us 6 hours! My husband has devised a great system using an Atlas Copco hydraulic pounder to accomplish this task and last year, we were getting pretty proficient at linepost pounding. Our record is putting in 33 lineposts in about 3 hours.
Our friend Barry, came to help us on Thursday morning and we accomplished this task in 2 hours! So, early on Friday morning, he brought along Mary and the 4 of us pounded posts. We beat the 2 hour time by 8 minutes so Barry was in the mood to see if he could better that time, so we did one more row of posts. This time, we didn't finish the row, all of us were flagging and we had to call it, so this row DNQ (did not qualify---golf speak). Barry was off to Seattle on Saturday in preparation for the PGA Golf US Open where he will be putting in 110 hour weeks. Four rows done, only 6 more to go! Thanks very much for the help, guys!

Annual Cycle of Grapevine Growth in Our Vineyard: Fill in the Blanks

I am reading an online article called Grapevine Structure and Function written by Ed Hellman. In this article, Hellman gives a timeline of the annual cycle of grapevine growth as it relates to sites in Oregon.
It is a nice guide, but I thought that I would try to figure this timeline out for our vineyard. We now have two data points for when budswell occurs in our vineyard: In 2014 budswell occurred around May 10th and in 2015 budswell occurred on May 8th, followed by budbreak a week or so later. Therefore, in general, during the second week in May is when we should be seeing our dormant buds come out of its winter hibernation. I started to fill out Hellman's Annual Cycle of Grapevine Growth timeline like this:

This year, we do have blossoms on our grapevines and I have been monitoring their growth. So far, I haven't seen any of the blossoms bloom, but according to Hellman's article, bloom usually occurs 50-80 days after budburst in Oregon. Here is how our blossoms have been developing since we first saw their appearance on May 18th.

I'm going to continue to fill in the blanks for Hellman's Annual Cycle of Grapevine Growth as it pertains to our vineyard and update this blog. I'm looking forward to bloom!