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For the curious: the last spray consisted of Prolivo, a newish protectant of powdery mildew. Apparently knocks back any existing mildew on contact and protects going forward. Also used Sylcoat, which is some kind of organic pesticide used on fruits (grapes). Clark Vineyard Management does a great j...

The kill-two-birds-with-one-stone solution for both the mildew and the mites could be mineral oil. I'm a big fan of Omni Supreme Spray for both mildew and botrytis, but it's actually registered as a miticide. Stylet Oil is the same thing but more expensive.

We plant new fields diligently for the first 3 years and don't bother after that. The irrigation intervals don't really match up after that. Once the field is up and going we're not watering often enough for young plants. Hand watering is about the only other option. That's why I think that replant...

I'd say my set was pretty crappy, and the crop is going to be lighter than average.
On the other hand, I have a real bumper crop of Morning Glory. That stuff really seemed to enjoy the Spring rains.

I was grafting over some vines that went in as replants in 2016 today and remembered this thread. I tried the Duarte Uber vines in this instance, and the results were much better than any other replant MO that I've tried. These vines were fully ready to be productive this year, whereas other replant...

What does a major heat spike like this do to flowering vines? I think a heat spike can be helpful at transitional stages like flowering and veraison in getting the vineyard synched up. Cool weather during set and veraison seems to involve more stragglers. I probably had some lagging viognier that w...

Casey asked me to post this photo of grape flowers that I labeled to help folks understand what's going on. (I posted it a couple of days ago on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter so you may have seen it there.) Flowering.JPG Nice, clear diagram. Can't help but wonder -- who are the pollinators of the...

Can you share a little more information about this? Next year's crop is being formed inside the canes of this year's growth. The spring and early summer weather is important for next year. The amount of sun and warmth on the vines happening now matters to next crop. If I remember correctly, the 201...

I damn neared rolled into the biggest swarm of bees with the sprayer today that I've ever seen in the vineyard. About 4 foot by 1.5 foot solid mass of parked honeybees with a 15 foot diameter cloud of the airborne contingent. Not the most aggressive types, but I still think it might have pissed them...

I learn as much about my own neck of the woods from you than I ever did while living there. One tidbit I can add is that the Deaver and Cooper wine families are pretty closely related. I could have this wrong, but I think that Dick Cooper's mom was a Deaver before she married Dick's dad, Henry. Coin...

I was spraying today and thinking that, despite bloom still ongoing in the pinot and chard, I wasn't smelling much. Then I motored into the viognier and got whalloped by wall of fecund, flowery aromas. Viognier can't help being aromatically forward at every stage of development.

I got out to spray on Friday, and it looks like the pinot and chard started flowering about Thursday this week. That's a couple days earlier than in 2018. Viognier and syrah are still tight. I hope that means that I've missed the worst of the rain during actual bloom, but, after all this crap weathe...

Whether you're flowering or not, this weather is probably having an adverse on next year's fruitfulness. Supply could tighten up beyond this year.

What the hell happened to my Mediterranean climate? The one upside is that I'm feeling good about having held off on advertising grapes for sale until after set. The market has got to be tightening up as I type.

[quote My site is a very, very hot one. The thought is that by keeping the soil free of other growth, the irrigation from the emitters will go to the vines. Another thought passed on to me is that because we are so hot, we disk frequently to keep the top layer of soil soft and able to absorb the hea...

I'm kind of dying to disk the odd rows this year, just to smooth out some of the gopher/labrador mounds and holes. It's been a few years of no-till, and spraying has become a pretty violent tractor ride. All this late rain complicates that plan a bit, as I'd like to keep a full cover crop to suck up...

I thought I had seen that there was some number of employees (9 or 10?) below which the statute was inapplicable. Or was that just wishful thinking?

It's still pretty soggy out there. I got overconfident after a few clear days and ventured into no-man's-land with the tractor for some mop-up thistle spraying around the pond and got it stuck. Some bad words were uttered, to no avail.

Is this what you mean? [/url]https://laffort.com/en/ranges/sparkling/[/url]

My subsurface drainage (at about 42" deep) is running pretty well, and the irrigation pond is filling. I think it was March before I hit this point last year, and I'm breathing easier about water this year.

I would think that electric shears might level the playing field between the sexes. It's no small investment, at about $2000/rig, but I do think it starts making more sense to optimize labor efficiency as cost and scarcity gets more acute. I've got one older Infaco set that doesn't include the safe...

Do either of you find that cane pruning leaves the fruit more exposed (less canopy) and more susceptible to sun burn? I switched most of my vineyard to cane pruning last year, and I didn't see that the fruit was more exposed than on a cordon VSP. It wasn't to toughest year to avoid sunburn, so mayb...

Adapt or perish. Here we are in the new era of farming. After harvest, pruning is the most time consuming and expensive task. Historically we've used the women's crew for every task except pruning. The ladies all carry pruning shears but usually need them for cutting live shoots while disbudding an...

Was probably due to re-seed the cover also, but I didn't want to disturb everything that sprouted in the Oct 1, 2 rains. Plus, I was buried in grapes and didn't really have time. I was afraid all that grass might have died in the ensuing dry weeks, but it looks like it's thriving after the recent ra...

No scenic yellow of senescent leaves in the vineyard this year. A pretty healthy post-harvest canopy, thanks to abundant irrigation water this year, got blasted brown by frost sometime before my last trip out to dump pomace yesterday. No harm done, since everything was picked in Oct, and most of the...

Nobody welcomes repeated price increases, but consider the alternative model. You can either stack up good vintage after good vintage and earn your way into elite status, with successive concomitant price increases. Or, you can debut as if you had already earned your way into the upper echelon and t...

Also on the subject of yields -- last year, at this point, I was bemoaning the fact that I didn't have enough water left after the Labor Day heat spike to give my vines a decent post-harvest irrigation and put them to bed well fed. I was concerned that a lack of carb storage was going to bode ill fo...

Is anyone else starting to get the feeling that this is a really strong vintage? I know we're cartoon-like in proclaiming great vintages every year, but this time I really mean it. And I want to link that to crop load. This vintage reminds me of 2013, which was also a very heavy year that came out o...

Forgive me, Stewart, but I am not totally familiar with your winery. Are you growing as well as doing all that hands on winemaking? Responsible for sales, too? I feel your struggle through your post! Hope you get everything in barrel soon. Hey Merrill. Yes, I'm the grower and winemaker. Sales too, ...

It's the point of the year where I always start to struggle to close out the vintage. Once you get everything picked, hauled and loaded into fermenters, most of the stress and herculean work days are behind you. With the real urgency passed, my body thinks it's time to sleep, eat, drink and be merry...

Wrapped up harvest with the syrah this week. It was only 22 brix, but a yellowjacket infestation kind of forced my hand. I figured they would head back to the nest by 10pm, but quite a few seem to bed down in the clusters. Fortunately, they were too sleepy to sting the pickers, but they came wanderi...

I'm in similar shape with syrah, the last thing I still have hanging. 20B on Wed after the rain. Heavy crop, but loose bunches that all looked like clean yesterday. I don't think I'll ever get my viognier and syrah synced up to make a co-ferment easy. I bagged up 350 lbs of lightly pressed viognier ...

Day 22 and provisions exhausted -- beer, coffee, cereal ... all gone. A half bag of chips is looking like the day's ration. Then, out of the mist, appears my barrel sales rep (Mathew Conrady, TB Tonnellerie) bearing a couple gourmet sandwiches, homemade pasta salad and a six-pack of Lagunitas. Best ...

Lisa sent out a (public) note saying that Steve's recovery was unlikely to progress to the point that he would be able to resume the lead in organizing the event, and that she was unable to make it work with the time demands of teaching, family and Steve's recovery. Good people, and this was sad news.

I picked the viognier and mopped up the last of the pinot (pommard) last night. I really expected a mess out there after showers Mon and Tues followed by a very still and humid day on Wed. Plus, it's a huge crop, and the grapes to be picked were the biggest berried ones I have. If my vineyard is eve...

Going to try an 'early morning' pick tomorrow. Bought 25 headlamps and we're gonna start at 6:00 am. Really can't see the fruit clearly now until about 6:45 or even later if it's foggy. We need more picking time at the cool part of the day. I'm not shifting to night pick, just trying to get a few m...

I cut my premiums by almost 50% switching from Nationwide Agribusiness to a policy through Bidwell Insurance in Chico. I connected with them because they showed up at a Garagiste tasting where they were specifically targeting small producers. Here's the contact info for my agent Andrea Zigan Bidwell...

I had some pinot hanging naked that needed to get pulled off before the birds got it. Some of it was excess from a sparkling pick last Friday. We had dropped nets and pulled leaves in preparing to pick. The crop came in so heavy that we filled the order with rows left over, and those rows were going...

I talked with a guy who works with lab equipment pretty extensively, and his take was that Hanna is kind of a money pit. Parts, especially electrodes, fail frequently. That is consistent with my experience with an older Hanna SO2 titrator, but I was hoping that things had changed in the 10 years sin...

I got a note from David Z, after he had quit the board, in which he introduced himself by saying that I might know him as the guy everyone on Berserkers hated for for saying that all wines are shit. I generally appreciate it when consumers bother to write up their impressions, but I really appreciat...

Picked pinot for sparkling last night. I delivered it to a winery that was bringing in Calistoga cab at the same time. Seemed a bit early for that, since most folks seem to be running on an "old normal" timetable this year. I think they have "old normal" or "neo-classical" (if you follow Gilman's us...

Anybody have any experience with the all-in-one unit, the HI-901W-01? For about $4000 you get pH, TA, VA, RS, YAN, SO2 capability. I had a Hanna SO2 titrator that has crapped out and is too obsolete to be serviced and am considering this one, but I'd like to hear if anyone else has been down this ro...

Just started to see color in a few berries in the Clone 777 section (always my earliest). That's at least 2 weeks behind years like 2014 and 2015. I'm also hanging a pretty good crop and expect that will help push harvest back to a more civilized late Sept/early Oct window that I used to consider no...

Thanks for the amazing tasting note, Paul!! Ditto. I'll be shamelessly stealing chunks of it. I'd rather take a beating than write a note about my own wine, and, when I do force myself, I end up with a lot more accompanying blather. I should note that the price Paul mentions assumes you have the di...

The main one that I'm aware of is Transition Equipment https://www.transitionequipment.com/. I think they are state-wide, but I'm not 100% sure.

It seems like they are pushing for more acidic wines, which, viola! acidic wines seem more minerally! Are far as I have ever heard, acid is the component most people think ascribe as minerality. I think there was near consensus that acidity was a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for miner...

So much for terrior champagne.gif Most of the folks there weren't throwing in the towel re terroir as being an important contributor to minerality. It was more that this part was less well established, and less actionable, than the winemaking part. On the other hand, one of the wines presented was ...

I attended a seminar on minerality that Vinquiry hosted on Tues. This is from memory, as I've mis-laid my notes, and it's just a few of the take-home messages. It's still very early in this field, and lots of ideas offered were pretty tentative. I don't think anything very solid came out of the vine...

Now that I read this, I'm kicking myself for not getting by the Guarachi table to try the Sun Chase chardonnay. I think that's consistently one of the best chard vineyards in the state. I tried and liked the Cline viognier, but I just grabbed a splash and dashed back to my table without getting the ...

Way too windy to spray today/tonight for me. I'm not in great shape in getting shoots tucked between the wires (a battle I lose every Spring), and I'm sure I snapped off a lot of loose ones that are waving in the wind.

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