Everything is growing

The growing season is moving along with great strides. Just as every year at this point, we have lots of work to do but only little time to tell about it. But still, everything is going smoothly and despite all the work we are really happy with the current development.

The picture above shows grapes in their so called pea-stadium. The naming should be obvious but what’s special, is that we have arrived at it extremely early. Compared to a “normal” year we’re ahead at least two weeks. We were not hit by any frost this spring and we did enjoy sufficient precipitation without severe storms. So everything is set up just right for an explosive development of our grapes. Even the current brief cold spell will not change that substantially.

But not only the grapes are growing, the vines also gain up to 10cm in length every day. When they grow too long, we have to thread them into the trellis so that they remain upright and stay nicely in the sun. That is manual work and one of the most time-consuming tasks in a year. Because the vines grow all over the summer, it has to be repeated two to three times in every vineyard! The vines growing out at the top of the trellis are then capped with a machine not unlike a sickle-bar. See a comparison before-after in the picture above.