A Summer Solstice Vineyard Walking Tour

For the last three months, I've been taking walks through the vineyard every Wednesday morning to gather photographs to share during the weekly Instagram Live broadcasts I've been hosting from Tablas Creek. This has given me a more consistent archive of the changes in the vineyard landscape than I've ever had before. And even as we've reopened our tasting room this week (hooray!) I'm going to continue these weekly walks and reports, to make sure that we can share what's going on here with everyone, whether or not they're able or comfortable to come for a visit.

The landscape has made its annual transformation from late winter shaggy green, with soft edges around dormant vines, to midsummer vibrancy, with golden hillsides, brown earth, and intensely green vines. After months of transition, the last two weeks have felt complete. Here's a visual tour. First, to set the stage, a long view looking down from the vineyard's highest spot, through Grenache vines and over Counoise, Tannat, and to a block (on the far hill) that used to be Grenache Blanc and is now home to our newest grape, Muscardin:

A photo from within that new Muscardin block shows what it looks like, two weeks post-grafting (left). A close-up of one of the grafts (right) shows the new Muscardin bud already sprouting. 

The twelve additional (short) rows that we grafted over to Muscardin will more than double what we put into the vineyard last year, and will give us enough to really wrap our heads around it when it gets into production next year. If you're interested in learning a little more about this exceptionally rare grape, I summarized the little that's available in the literature in a post last summer.

The vineyard, after a longer-than-normal period of shagginess due to the late rain we received and our caution in trying to minimize staff out here in the early days of the Covid-19 shutdown, is mostly back looking tidy. Here are two views. On the left,  down through a Mourvedre block toward Las Tablas Creek, and on the right, a view through our old Vermentino block. Click on either for a larger view:

We've seen an excellent fruit set this year, with virtually no shatter and uniform, healthy clusters. Below, see Vermentino (left) and Grenache (right), two of our earlier varieties, whose berries are already pea-size or larger and mostly round:

But even less precocious grapes like Mourvedre (left) and Syrah (right) have made good progress too. If I had to make a prediction, it would be that we're looking at veraison and harvest more or less on schedule with the past two year, at times close to our 20-year averages:

The next photo, of a head-trained Tannat block in the middle of the vineyard, shows why it's so important for us to get in and clean out the weeds in these blocks early in the growing season. Already, the vines are bushy enough that their canes almost touch, and running a tractor through here would damage the vines.

In the trellised sections of the vineyard (like the Counoise block below) we've been finishing up our shoot thinning. This process helps open up the canopies to the free flow of light and air, and allows us to reduce and even the crop load from vine to vine to encourage even ripening. You can see the canes that we've discarded on the ground:

Although we're still two months or more away from harvesting any grapes, many of the fruit trees that we have interplanted in the vineyard are getting closer to their own harvests. We've been enjoying cherries the last couple of weeks, and this apple (pictured in front of a head-trained Mourvedre block) is set with a heavy crop and looking like we'll start to get fruit in July.  

I'll leave you with one last photo, of one of our handsome Grenache vines from our original plantings in 1992. At nearly three decades old, it's solidly in its prime, but looks like it's got decades of high quality production ahead of it. 

So, that's the report from the vineyard, as of mid-June. Looking great. Full speed ahead.