If you missed it, here’s the link to the video…  Grasso Vineyards – Winemaker Series

Now this is my first video documentary of the coming season, and as previously mentioned, I aim to give viewers an inside look on the entire winemaking process from grape to bottle.  Note: this video was taken one month ago –  sorry for the delay, I’ll get better at this I promise.  The sound volume on Frank is a little low, and I’ll correct that little problem in next videos. If there’s anything you miss or can’t hear, just send me a note and I’ll clarify.  I’ll give you the breakdown here in the blog, chronologically in the same order that it’s presented in the video.  I do get side tracked every once in a while (stares away for 45 seconds at food passing by… ohh sorry where was I?) so it might take some time to get used to my writing style. I think you’ll find it fairly user friendly.

As we start our tour of the vineyard, Frank and I are discussing the concept of “Shoot Thinning,” and “Shoot Positioning.”  These aren’t necessarily difficult terms to grasp because they are quite literal. The week after we took this video Frank and his crew were out in the vineyard cutting/pruning out extra vegetative growth as well as superfluous fruit growth.  A little background on this year’s growing season:  we had an unusually cool, wet Spring season.  This provided our vineyards throughout the valley with continual vegetative growth – so that where we would normally expect to see one shoot, we’d see two; where we wanted two shoots we’d get three…

Maybe I should back track just slightly…. when we prune our vineyards in the late winter we prune off all of the growth from last year but leave what we call “nodes” (or even easier to remember: “positions”).  From these positions we will see our vegetative growth for the coming year. This year where we might have left 2 positions, three shoots would burst –  leaving us with more of vegetative growth then we want.  The cluster thinning comes into play in that from each position, where you would normally see one shoot growing and producing two clusters, we get extra clusters from the extra shoots.  The bottom line is that too much vegetative growth can put the vine out of balance and create two negative scenarios: 1) a “vegetative” quality to your wine and 2) too many berry clusters on the vine, which prevents an even ripening of the fruit.  So Frank – being the experienced farmer that he is –  removes the extra shoots and the clusters that should not be there, thus setting the vine back into a state of balance.

Tomorrow’s update will include information regarding Phylloxera and Sustainable Farming.