Next week we expect to see the beginning of lag phase. Lag phase is the point in berry development when we see that the seed hardens as well as the beginning of numerous other physiological changes happening in the plant. It is called lag phase because it marks the one period during berry development when it stops taking on weight for a period of time. The graphic below shows the shape of the growth curve for berry development among some other fun facts (if you’re into that sort of thing). What this brief cessation of growth makes for the shape of the curve is what most techy people (like myself) call a double sigmoidal growth curve.

Finally the significance of this ‘lag phase’ term is that we know from our brilliant berry watching research that the berry has at this point taken on half of it’s final weight. With that we can then estimate, through weighing samples of our clusters, what our yields will be! If they are too high we will then make our final adjustments during the second thinning pass.

For now we will be making our first pass well into the next couple of weeks. We will fill you in with what the lag phase weights are looking like next week though.

- Cheers to green harvest

 Mike E.

We are now preparing for our first pass of fruit thinning. We are finishing up removing the suckers and cleaning the unnecessary shoots on the heads of the vines as well as removing leaves in the fruit zone. Moderate leaf removal will not only help with even ripening by allowing sunlight to hit the fruit,  but will also aid with air flow (thus reducing fungal pressure) and will help our fruit thinning go faster so that we can see what we are cutting down!

We have hedged our vineyard in the time-frame between our last blog. Our canopy looks upright and uniform – however – in the process we have had an unlucky bout of equipment breakage. This is keeping our tractor guys busy repairing what is now, I believe, the fourth piece of equipment so far. Lesson to learn – be patient because stuff always breaks when you need it!

Finally – we have had our first irrigation event today! Our experimental block – which is our densest planted block, has started to show droopy tendril syndrome. This is a classic sign of water stress and typically happens first in this block. This is normally one of only three or four blocks we irrigate before harvest in a normal year. We do have the capability of irrigating most blocks in our vineyard but have only used them in establishing the vines and during drought years. What this does indicate is the vines will have to focus now on fruit development and therefore slow down with vegetative growth. We have started to see this in other blocks as well. This is good to hear because we are still a little behind in terms of how the vines are growing in an average year.

We have also begun shoot counting which is the first step in making our calculations for how many clusters to leave for our first pass in fruit thinning. Once we know how many shoots we have on average in each block we will then tell our crew how many clusters to leave. We will error on the high side for the first pass in case our cluster weights are below average – which is seeming to happen this year if you recall me talking about the loose clusters in a previous blog. The first pass is designed to remove the bulk of what we know we won’t need and then the second pass will be the fine tuning pass to hit our target yields within a 0 – 0.4 tons/acre margin.

On Monday we will begin our first thinning pass in our early blocks which marks the beginning of one of our most time-consuming processes!

We will keep you posted on our progress!