You guys have already gone through and prune these vines and they’re now going through the vineyards and tying them down. And the reason we tie them down is because we want to have all the green growth up through this catch wires, these loose wires and have the vines trained to these wires here, they are under a higher tension as well as the load bearing wire is. As the grapes form, this vine is going to pull down and weigh this wire down to heavier gauge. These are cabernet franc grapes vines and they are being grown for ice wine and so we trellis them differently than we would for our speck family reserve cab or our cabernet franc varietal wine.
The difference is that what we’ll do is we’ll tie these vines like that in a bow. We’ll take one arm from each trunk, we grow two trunks, so we’ll take the best arm from each trunk, tie it down like that. And the reason we do this is because it’s a curve, you can get an extra cluster to in there. We leave more grape per vine for ice wine than we would for a still wine because we want actually to slow the ripening back at harvest because these grapes have to hang so long so we want to keep them.
The sugar is high but not so high they start to rot and break down so while you got more grapes per vine for this particular wine, we’ll bring them in cold enough that they actually, that your yield per vine comes down correspondingly. It’s about keeping acidity high which is so necessary to balance out the sweetness in the finished ice wine. So that’s why we grow them like this. Often we would grow for still wine cabernet franc like that and cut it back shorter and less clusters per vine, that makes sense.
Now what’s this guy doing here? So you got two of these tied down and you have these two guys that are sticking up like they’re flipping to a bird or something. These ones are here as a safety measure, so we’re in early April now, by the end of May we’re passed to the risk of spring frost. However it can still happen leading up to that, that we had a spring frost where we lose some of these buds. If that happens, here is plan B.
You pull those down and fill in. Wherever you needed to get the right number of buds, you want a bud every four to six inches depending on the grape variety. If we don’t need them we come through later to let them off.
When we’re trying to pick which arm to tie down, which is the better choice of the two per side, we’re looking for the bud spacing, I actually would say that you might take this other one because the bud spacing, I just grab this at random but this one has better bud spacing than the one I’ve picked. These are jammed in here. You can also correct to that with shoot thinning later so you do have some flexibility.
Whenever you have a bud, you’ll have a cluster of grapes hanging down and a green arm that grows up and that green arm produces leaves and the rule of thumb is that it’s about one meter of foliage required to ripen one cluster of grapes. And some plans put more growth out towards the tip than others.
There are variations, even the trim grape vines, so we don’t trellis all varieties the same and we also to consider the style of wine so this is the same trellising that we would use for sparkling wine which is made from chardonnay and pinot noir but it harvested before the still wines, chardonnay and pinot noir would be which would be trellised more like this.
Trellising in a wine industry varies by region and also varies by the kind of wine you’re making. The kind of wine we’re making is the premium so what happens is this kind of hand work adds a lot of expense to the wine making but it adds significantly to the quality of the wine making.
There is much easier way to grow these vines when it comes from a cost perspective. Do you know that this trellising, none of these pruning in time that we’re doing so much as let the plant grow its foliage, tie the trunks to the wire, let grapes form all over the plant and what you end up with is a bush that tends to shade itself. Lots of grapes at the top, in the middle, on the bottom and you get the difference between overripe to under ripe to perfectly ripe, all coming in together when you harvest them.
You’d certainly harvest mechanically, doing it that way. That’s a very industrial wine making approach and done all over the world. That’s not the kind of wine we’re making, this is all about tying vines down, shoot thinning, pruning, we go through the vineyards and pull the leaves, a lot of hand operations where necessary we automate as much as we can but a lot of to make great wine, a lot of us has to be done by hand which is the fact of life.
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