Will Sell Wine for Food

Hello and welcome to the Telve di sopra Vineyard newsletter addition number 5!  We’re trying hard to keep this rolling along.  We hope you enjoy what we have to share!

Telve di sopra (Tell vay de soap rah)

Instagram: @telvedisopravineyard

Between harvest and December there wasn’t much going on in the vineyard, mostly because I was recuperating from the season, and spending more time with my new wife.  That all changed when December came around.  Started pruning every chance I could as it is the most labor intensive and longest lasting task in the vineyard.  I pretty much prune Monday through Thursday, then head to my wife’s house in Kent on Thursday night and return back to the vineyard at noon on Monday.  Because I’m the only one working on the vineyard, I prune all day and at night I work on the tasting room or other winery tasks that need to get done. This pattern will continue until the beginning of April, but I enjoy pruning as it gives me time alone to reflect on my life and the life of each individual vine that I touch, and not to mention listen to podcasts and music. 

With pruning, you need to take each vine’s weaknesses and strengths into account before you make the first cut.  You are always thinking one to two years ahead in order to enhance the sap flow of the vine up the trunk to the next year’s renewal spurs and this year’s fruiting cane, which was a new shoot the previous year.  The fruiting cane is the cane that will have new shoots growing out of it after bud beak this spring in April which bear flowers which then turn into grape clusters in mid to late June.  You are also assessing the vigor or lack there of for each vine, because that will determine how many buds you leave and their location for sufficient sap flow.  On top that of that, the fruiting cane that you select needs to be one that had good vigor the previous year with the correct thickness and internode length, have grown off of one year old wood, and was bathed in sunlight from previous year’s period of flowering until verasion (when grapes starting to change color).  Sunlight from the previous year triggers the cells in the new shoot to produce microscopic flowers in its buds. Contained in these new buds found on the new shoots are the microscopic flowers which remain hiden through the winter on the potential fruiting cane’s dormant bud’s and if correctly selected as a fruiting cane during pruning they will start to grow new shoots at bud break that will allow the microscopic flows to grow and become grape clusters in the new year’s growing season.  Selecting the right cane as the fruiting cane is a critical decision that you make for each vine during pruning season. If you chose the wrong one, one that was shaded by other vines, not off of one year old wood, wrong thickness and internode length (which is an indication of nutrient deficiency) or will not receive sufficient sap flow in the new year, you can easily loose 70% of your crop.  Telve di sopra Vineyard as around 15,000 vines that need to be pruned.

Many, many, many natural events and predators can cause the new buds or flowers to be damaged before fruit set after flowering such that the buds won’t grow, or the flowers will die.  We’ve had frost the last three years in a row, which instantly kills any swelling buds or new shoots.  I have seen on a limited occasion a vine weevil that will drill holes directly into new buds that are beginning to swell, killing the bud.  For this little bugger I’ve released parasitic nematodes hoping this natural remedy will suffice as I’ve never sprayed pesticides and will not going forward! In June during flowering, if there is cloudy weather, lots of rain, high humidity, or cold temperatures, ala Juneuary, the flowers will turn brown and fall of the new shoots. In 2020, it rained 23 times between the last week of May and first week of July and when it wasn’t raining the sun would come out for half a day or so causing the wet soil to evaporate its moisture resulting in +90% humidity.  So, it was either cloudy and raining or super high humidity and 80% of the flowers fell of the vines that year and there was no harvest.

Farming is hard, but opening a bottle of wine that you made from grapes that you grew and thinking back to that successful vintage it all seems worth it!

We bottled or should I say I bottled a lot of wine this winter/year, so soon we will have new releases for our 2022 Cab Franc, 2023 Estate Marquette, 2023 Estate Pinot Nori, 2022 Malbec, 2022 Estate Pinot Noir, and 2022 Mourvèdre