Newsletter Volume III, Issue 3 (September 2005)
| Welcome Welcome to the September 2005 issue of our newsletter!  The hot summer weather has been great for growing grapes. We had our first real harvest of grapes just last week. Read on for more! Newsletter Contents  Tell your friends about our newsletter!  |
| What’s New Most of the vines are hardening off as we speak. As a matter-of-fact, the Valiant vines appear to be just about shut down. It was a great season for our maturing vines. We continue working to train the vines to a more permanent shape on the trellis. Our only problem now is that we don’t have any more room to plant additional vines. Maybe in the future we’ll plant a larger vineyard…stay tuned.  As I mentioned earlier, last week we finished our first real harvest of Valiant grapes. All told, we picked a little over 10 pounds of grapes. On top of that the birds left us a few Frontenac clusters - not enough to do anything with, so we threw them into the batch of Valiant jelly we made. After it was all said and done, we ended up with 14 half pint jars of jelly. It tastes excellent and the deep purple color is amazing.  |
| Summer Notes This turned out to be a great season for vine growth and fruit ripening. We had many days over 90 degrees. There were a few dry stretches where we didn’t get rain for a couple weeks at a time. So we ended up watering all of our vines, not just the new ones. In a pinch one day, I took an old garden hose and poked 1/4″ holes in it every six feet. Then with a cap on one end of it, we were able to water six vines at a time. In this part of the world, Frontenac grapes are usually harvested the third or even fourth week of September. But with this summer’s heat and sunshine, most vineyards picked Frontenac grapes on the 17th of September.  |
| Winemaking Despite not having enough grapes of our own, I REALLY wanted to make my first batch of wine from real grapes. I have made wine from kits, but to me that isn’t quite the real thing. So I had been thinking and planning, planning and thinking and thought I had until the end of the month to get ready for the grapes to be ready at area vineyards. Then I decided to check in with one of the vineyards and found they were harvesting on the 17th - this past weekend. So I quickly put together my shopping list (yeast, campden tablets, acid test kit, extra carboys, etc, etc, etc). Then on Saturday we made the drive up to Martell Vineyards near Somerset, WI and picked up the grapes. The Martells have a crusher/destemmer on hand on harvest day, so it’s really a piece of cake. I didn’t have to even pick my own grapes!  I took the must home and the initial readings were: 1.1% TA The fruit looked, smelled and tasted great! I added the necessary amount of campden tablets, waited a day and added the yeast starter on the 18th. The primaries (I ended up using two) are both happily bubbling away. SG as of 9:30PM on the 19th was 1.077. Check out our winemaking page for updates on our winemaking adventure.  |
| Vineyard Status Valiant - Three of our Valiant vines did great this season. We harvested a small amount of fruit off of them. The other three are a little weak. One of those three is dead - the other two are recovering from getting their roots chewed by gophers. We kept them watered and fertilized and they seem to be ok. Next spring I plan to start some cuttings to fill in a few empty spots including this one dead Valiant.  Prairie Star - FINALLY - I was able to make progress in getting our Prairie Stars to go. Last spring we transplanted 5 vines from our Hudson, WI vineyard and one of our original vines was still alive. Four of the five transplants took - one died. The original vine had a great season and grew up and past the top trellis wire. We recently tasted some freshly harvested Prairie Star grapes at Martell Vineyards - the fruit from this vine is excellent. Frontenac - The Frontenacs continued where they left off last season and pretty much overtook the Valiants as far as being the biggest, fastest growing vines in the vineyard. We had a tiny crop of fruit off of them this season, but expect much more next season. Marechal Foch - Despite having many buds frozen due to late spring frosts, the Foch have come back quite well. Their trunks are thick and 11 of the 12 made it up to and past the top wire. We are keeping an eye on the Foch next spring to determine if they will get frosted back to the ground every year. If this proves to be the case, we will pull them and replace them with more Frontenac. Sabrevois - Like the Prairie Stars, our Sabrevois finally seem to have taken hold this season. 3 of the 4 vines made it well past the top trellis wire. We may have a small crop from them next season. In any event, we will start two new vines from cuttings next season to fill in the remainder of the row. Thanks! Thanks for taking the time to read our newsletter! We don’t pretend to be experts at growing grapes in cold climates, but rather we hope you find the newsletter an informative and entertaining source of information. If you do, feel free to forward the e-mail to others that may be interested. If you have suggestions for future topics or general comments/suggestions, feel free to send us a note using our Contact Us page. Our next newsletter should arrive in your inbox sometime soon. In the meantime, thanks for reading and take care! Don’t forget to tell your friends about our newsletter! |
Grapelog » Newsletter Archive Said,
September 16, 2006 @ 2:12 am
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