GOOD BONES

It is rare that I get off on a piece of machinery. I view most of these accessories as serving a purpose, more utilitarian than being a showpiece. Sure, I "love" my blue New Holland tractor. And when I'm home up north I miss it as I drive around the yard cutting grass on a lil' Craftsman 10 horse. And when I'm tilling the garden in New England it takes me an hour or 2 using my Troy-bilt tiller, where it would take maybe 5 minutes with my New Holland with the tilling attachment.

But here is my new In & Out Tiller, still at the shop getting its hydraulics hooked up, shining bright yellow in the sun waiting to be put to good use. Looking at it all you see are the bones. There isn't a piece of wasted metal or iron on this machine. Bare skeleton doing the bare essentials. No glistening fenders or armor put on just for show. If it wasn't for the traditional slowness of hydraulic action, I'd swear the thing could fly with all the moving parts it has.

Vineyards tend to be planer. There are some that are on slopes, but as you drive a tractor between the rows, the tractor sits exactly 90 degrees from the land it is driving over. Knowing this comfortable fact, you realize that the accessories attached to the back will be in-line with the tractor, and move parallel to the ground surface too. I go into all this to help you understand that even though the new In & Out Tiller can twist this way and that, it is unlikely I will ever need some of the designed-in movements it is capable of doing. Set its height using the 3-point mechanism on the tractor, determine the starting point away from the wire, and go.

I purchased the tiller from Italy. When one thinks of wine, or at least the years of wine experience within the industry, you think of either France or Italy. Napa may be doing well in the wine business domestically, but they aren't known for their ground-breaking advances in hard core vineyard machinery (and no, NAPA auto parts didn't start in that part of California). It was shipped over via container during the winter and just saw the light of day a week ago as the local distributor unpacked it and sent it over to eastern Virginia. The better news was that even though the manual was written in Italian, it has great pictures !

The staking is almost done now, and it appears the timing will work out well as I finish that hammering job and start my tilling trials. Look for a video in the future.

6000 STAKES...MOSTLY WELL DONE

As I get older, just as ambitious but restrained in knowing what I am capable of doing in a short period of time, I try to choose one major project to finish while I'm at the vineyard. In a previous post I believe I talked about my new "toy" for 2012....an In & Out Tiller I purchased from Italy. This accessory is attached to the back of the farm tractor and allows me to till in between each of the grapevines and under the wires. It has a sensor on it that sends a microswitch signal to the heart of the machine, that then hydraulically retracts the tilling mechanism when it approaches a vine or a post.

In one....no many.....of my earlier posts I have complained how weeds seem to dominate my nightmares about the vineyard. Controlling weeds really is a big thing. Hopefully this new machine will calm my worries. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The new tiller just arrived but is a few days away from being hooked up and ready for trial. What I have to do now is pound in 6000 stakes. You see, the tiller doesn't know a small vine from a weed. The grapevines planted last year are not sturdy enough to fend off a sensor, and the tiller would make mincemeat out of them if there wasn't a method to protect them. Hence the stakes.

I purchased 6000 oak stakes and picked them up in West Virginia on this trip down to the vineyard. 6000 stakes weigh somewhere around 1800 pounds and completely fill up the back of my pickup. Figure 2 full skids worth, each skid being 48" x 42" x 30" high. Talk about control issues on the drive down ! I felt like I was hydroplaning on the interstates, nose in the air and waving left to right as I pointed the truck south. Driving a little slower helped tremendously, and again I have to admit that it is with conditions like this when I finally obey the speed limits. 60 mph seems so slow !

Four hours after I left WVA I was pulling into the farm, tired as can be but prepared to now pound in the stakes when I woke up the next morning. Relatively speaking, the ground was soft, though it still took 7 or 8 hits with a sledge to put the stake in only 6". Each vine gets 2, one on each side of the vertical vine rootstock. When I finally get to till I will drive up one side of a row and drive back on the other. This makes for a nice 24" cleared area directly under the wires.

Until I get the tractor ready, there is very little more I can say about it. I am quite eager to see it in action, but in the meantime I have to pound stakes. As of now I've completed all the Cabernet Sauvignons. I have the Petit Verdots still to do....maybe 3 more days of pounding. Let's see.....that's 1000 vines, 2000 stakes, times 8 wacks each for a total of 16000 wacks of lifting a 2 1/2 pound sledge, which makes for a repetitive bench press(with one arm) of 40,000 pounds or 20 tons. Hope my arm has it in it !

My other new gadget, alot less expensive fortunately, is a time lapse camera. I've mounted it in Block 1 aimed at one of the more developed Seyval Blancs and with this I am trying to get a nice set of pictures showing bud break and shoot growth. I was worried that I might miss a good starting point but with all the cold we have been getting lately it looks like we will be getting a delayed bud break. I originally forecasted April 1st.....it looks more like mid-April this year. It should coincide with some replacement vines I have coming in right about then that will fill some of the gaps resulting from last year's drought and subsequent losses.

Diane is flying down this next week. Richmond is holding a big expo called Wineries Unlimited which she, as the winemaker, and I are attending. It is time to get serious now. We are most likely going to get our first crop this Fall and we now need to gear up with all the winemaking equipment. Not really a social event, it is wall to wall stainless tanks,pumps,filters,destemmers & crushers, bottling machines and on and on. Tie this in with getting a winery built next year and it looks like, once again, we will have our plate filled....or at least our glasses.

A NEW SEASON

There is only minor debate as to when the new season begins. Some vintners believe it is when the last grapes make it to crush during the harvest season. Others think it falls somewhere between the time dormant pruning occurs and bud break. Time wise there is a big time difference here. Harvest is in September or October, while bud break has been as close to April 1st as the last frost permits. This is almost 6 months of variance. For me it is somewhere in the middle, maybe more like the calendar with January being the start. When the harvest concludes there still is some warm weather to work within, and here is when you not only shut the operation down, but there are the many small projects that took the back seat relative to other priorities when the grapes were the king. These projects relate to "last year's" season, though obviously they need to be done prior to next season. In January however there are all the things that need to get done before the grapevines require absolute attention. And to know that the new season has started is to know that there is a daily juggling of time prior to the anticipated April 1st "blast off" doing the needed jobs within the weather pattern of warm days and still brutally cold days. Last week was my kick-off for the 2011 year. The string of warm days in a row justified a trip to the vineyard. The number one priority was to do the first round of rough pruning on the Block 1 grapes. Generally grapevines require 2 dormant prunings, doing the first pass right helps tremendously on the effort required for the second. During the first pass the idea is to get the vine to have the basic shape you want. This means getting rid of everything that doesn't contribute to the training method you have chosen. It involves choosing the main canes, trimming off the suckers, possibly shortening some growth that turned out to be overly aggressive in the previous season. If the vines were neglected this could mean alot of work, as much as 8 to 10 minutes devoted to pruning a single vine, which was the case for many of our Nortons. Diane and I walked away feeling fairly successful in our pruning efforts. Nearly all of the grapevines were pruned, leaving only a couple of rows of Seyval Blanc that had been late season pruned to go over again for new growth. And as if we didn't have enough to do, we gathered a bunch of prunings in order to make grapevine wreaths when Diane gets in the mood. The second pruning occurs just prior to bud break, which as mentioned has come on or around April 1st. This is where you decide how many buds you want to leave , with their appropriate spacing, depending on how vigorous the plant had been the previous season. This technically should include weighing off the clippings from the 1st pruning and putting this weight through a calculation specifically assigned to the type of grape you have. Some types can handle a greater fruit load than others. I'll go over the particulars in my next entry. I've mentioned in previous blogs how Diane makes an effort to pull me from the fields to do a little socializing while in the area. She found the perfect excuse this time around by getting us to go to the Virginia Vineyard Association's Wine Expo held in Richmond this past weekend. Held at the convention center, it showcased many of Virginia's 190 wineries by providing tastings of the many wines grown and produced in the Commonwealth. Having tasted plenty of wine, I can honestly say they would hold up well when compared to Napa or Sonoma. Also at the convention the Governor's Cup was awarded to Virginia's top red wine for 2011. It was a Meritage blend from a small microwinery.....quite good I might add.