Catie's Corner Wine Vineyard
Good morning my name is Mitchell Klug I am the Vineyard Manager for Crushpad Winery and today we’re at Catie’s Corner Vineyard in the Russian River Valley of Sonoma County. This vineyard is unique in quite few different ways, when you think of Russian River Valley, Russian River AVA you’re thinking of pinot noirs most likely but, there are a lot of micro climates within this grape growing area that provides special and unique areas for things other than pinot noir orange ordinary.
This vineyard is predominantly if not entirely pinot or serah we’re going to be looking at some pinot today. One time a rootstock that this pinot block happens to be on is considered a more moderately vigorous roots stock. It’s a more drought tolerant root stock so understanding soils a little bit, I suspect that they are able to irrigate a little less frequently out here or perhaps have a longer duration between irrigations because of the root stock.
It also tends to be a slightly later ripening root stock or has that potential, so they can allow this fruit to come to full flavor and for maturity under these conditions. The soils here is here is the Wachika series of clay loams they are sedimentary base soils from Marine type environmental conditions. His soils are reasonable deep moderately fertile and really have a fairly high water holding capacity so there’s a good amount of vigor that can come from this soils as a result of that.
What I take is impressive about the farming here is you can see that they removed some leaves above the clusters to provide and optimum light environment. They’ve done it on the morning sun side of the vine so as not to get that hot afternoon sun on the clusters and they’ve got free hanging clusters. You don’t see a lot of cluster crowding or cluster stocking so each one of these clusters has its own environment which is also very good.
These vines as you walk down this vineyard you’ll see have a more than adequate canopy leave surface area to support the crop load. It’s not this proportionate either one way or the other. Too many leaves are not enough fruit or too much fruit on that enough leaves which is what we really refer to when we talk about a balanced vine. Is that we have the appropriate relationship of leave surface area to crop load to roots and typically the root distribution and mass mirrors the leaves surface area.
Catie’s corner is set up with the pruning system and the Vineyard Architecture to be a divided canopy system. This is essentially a quadrilateral cord on system so there’s a bilateral cord on, on each side of the wire separated with the help of the trunk to facilitate having both more nodes and consequently more shoots provide to express best the vigor of this side and the capacity of this site.
Grape vines bear fruit on one year old wood. This was last years wood, these two nodes were left for shoots to grow this year and this is years wood and as you can see on great vines they bear fruit off of one year old wood unlike apples for example which bear fruit off of two year old wood and peaches and many fruit trees bear fruit of the older wood.
So here we are in the pinot. Well that does it for today and I wanted to say thanks for taking a look at Catie’s corner with me.
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