Seyval Harvest this upcoming weekend!

The brix levels are in and gerald says we will harvest the seyval next week!

Prepare to be Zazzled.

another blog not about the vineyard? what's going on? football season has started and practice coincided with the august southern maryland wine growers cooperative meeting. momma&theboys stayed at home and gerald covered the meeting and vineyard work. unfortunately, no brix measurements this week. maybe next week.

but take a look at this!
i know! so before you ask, what is that?, i'm going to tell you. these are women's mini-slip on keds and custom notecards. i opened a zazzle.com account and, using the french oak barrel photo, created a custom designed shoe. and then for good measure, i created a notecard using the french oak barrel, as well. if you would like to see the ourvineyard product line, visit: http://www.zazzle.com/pd/find?qs=ourgirl

There, you will see the custom products i made today. check in every once in a while. boy1 and i have some cool ideas. maybe you'll find something you like!

What's up with the Widgets?

have you noticed the widget on the left? its a widget that will track the brix of our grape varietals as we progress weekly through to harvest. i made it in widgenie, a widget maker that creates animated charts from an excel spreadsheet. its simple and easy to use. the best part is that you can grab the widget code and embed it into your own social media. whenever i update the widget, your embedded widget will update, as well. so feel free to grab it and share with friends. widgenie recognized our blog's use of their product in their latest email.










you'll also notice that you can now subscribe to an RSS feed of the blog. and if you like, i also offer a widget blog feed that's quite pretty. i made that one in spring widget—that's where i found the RSS feed of Mike Steinberger/Slate Wine Articles. Mike writes really well and i enjoy all of his articles. spring widget is easy to use and i recommend using it and sproutbuilder, another widget maker.

feel free to share!

Veraison

veraison is well underway

Veraison started a little over two weekends ago in the proofing vineyard. the seyval is well underway, as it is our early grape. they are delicious! those boys can grow some lush seyval. the rest of the grapes are turning their colors, but taste of tannin and green peppers, so boy1 and i concentrate our attention to the seyval until ger shooes us out. the sevyal tastes tartly of apple and cinnamon. its a great treat to eat a grape berry you know is ripe and warm in the late morning sun. but we do this all in the name of developing a sense for when the grape is ripe, of course.


the weather is unseasonably cool and crisp, so much more like september than august. where are our dog days? ger is happy for both the cool weather and veraison, which signals the vines to STOP WITH THE VINE AND LEAF GROWING and concentrate on the fruit ripening. from here on out leaf canopy management should be easier. after we put up the netting last saturday (a whole other post) we woke up the next morning and culled the grape clusters. for a layperson like me, it looks wasteful. that's alot of grapes in that cart. we do add them to the compost, but culling is necessary. we want to concentrate on producing the best grape berries and so by cutting the third cluster (ger was at times, more aggressive) of every lateral shoot, the vine then concentrates on ripening the remaining clusters, producing a sweeter harvest. gerald is also pretty happy with the cool weather, which he says will slow the ripening and produce a more complex flavored grape.

wc pete returned back to washington this past week. the leaf canopy is still quaking from the heavy hand of his unmerciful rule. i'll post about the netting, next.

this weekend, we have begun testing the brix level of our grapes.