The Big Year!

The Big Year!

As we enter the year of the wood snake according to the Chinese Zodiac, the symbolic qualities linked with this creature such as resilience, perseverance through setback, intuition and strategy, couldn’t be more apt for our third year of grape growing.

2025 is the year we have been waiting for, it sounds almost futuristic to me, but it’s happening! And we will hopefully harvest our first grapes this autumn.

We are about to start winter pruning, this is a vital job in the vineyard calendar, where we will select the strongest and best positioned shoots and prune off the remaining ones. The objective is to encourage the vine to grow a balanced canopy, so that there’s the right amount of leaves to capture sunlight, but not too much foliage that might create humidity and disease and detract energy that needs to go towards ripening the grapes. Winter pruning is quite an endurance because inevitably the weather is cold or rainy, so more sunny days like we’ve had recently are ideal.

Spring frosts will be the next bullet to dodge, frost is fine while the vines are in dormancy, but when they start to wake up in the spring, they are vulnerable to frost damage due to emerging buds. When the temperature drops below a certain point, ice crystals form inside the cells damaging them.

Now that the vines are more established, we will start experimenting with some regenerative viticulture practices, such as mulching around the vines with woodchips to suppress weeds. We need to cut down some trees that are blocking out a lot of sunlight, in fact some of the trees are dead. This will potentially provide us with some woodchips, we are currently researching which type of wood is best for this. We will also use the wood for fire wood to heat our wood-fired hot tubs that we use on retreat days and for Airbnb guests.

There will be many more challenges in-store throughout the year, we are looking forward to seeing our vines come back to life this spring, right now, the sheep, alpacas and Po the pony are doing a great job munching down the grass and the weeds.

 

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