Week 14 (Sept. 16th - 20th)

This is Siegerrebe, my favorite eating grape that's supposed to be a wine grape. It is in the muscat family, so it has flavorful terpene aromas such as linalool and geraniol. We are making it into a sparkling wine. Yum!!

We have begun to replace all the rotting posts throughout the vineyards. We first walked down each row and pushed/pulled every post, listening to see if they cracked. If so, we'd mark them with orange tape. Afterwards, we pulled the staples out, cracked the post off the rest of the way, weaseled the old post stumps up with two shovels, widened the hole if needed, dropped a new post in and stapled the wires back to the posts. We have gotten pretty good at this art over the week. It takes us between 5 and 10 min/post, depending if they're caged like this one. Good thing the posts last close to 25 years!

We replaced a number of end-posts throughout the week as well. This entailed a bit more work: widening the angled holes, replacing anchors and strainers (the winch-like mechanism that I'm tightening here), and retying catch wires. We customized the trellises so that the fruiting wire was at a comfortable picking and pruning height. This happened to be around two and half feet, which allowed just enough space for a canopy of four and a half feet (roughly the shoot height needed to acquire 15 nodes, the number needed to support three clusters).

A Lacrosse news anchor and her husband stopped by on Friday to interview and film shots for a documentary that they are making on Minnesota wineries. It's fun to be in the action of such a novel industry!