After a year of planning we added to the Allegro vineyard.  This photo shows the new block of Petit Verdot on the right and Cabernet Franc on the left with Merlot in the far distance.  You might have to look pretty close to see the vines but there are thousands in the picture!   Big thanks to Ken, Tim, Andrew of Benchmark Custom US for piloting the awesome GPS guided planter and to Matt and Rebecca for there help.  Next up is the installation of the trellis.  

Greetings again!
We are about a month away from planting.  Fields are plowed and ready ready for a final disking. Vines will be shipped from the nurseries Monday April 20 and arrive by the end of that week (hopefully).  The laser planting team is scheduled for the first full week in May which gives me a good week or so to do my quality control routine on the vines (more on that later).  Trellis material is figured out and mostly ordered.  Labor to install the line poles, end poles and anchors is just about finalized.  Almost ready!    

We have a lot of vineyard excitement here at Allegro to look forward to in 2015: finish pruning and tying up vines, lots of preparation for new planting and all of the normal work that goes into each vintage. 

Planning for the new planting has a lot of my attention right now as lots of material has to be ordered, bought and delivered.  Vines are not the only thing that make up a vineyard.  One doesn't always think of it but besides vines and fruit, vineyards today are all about heavy metal, line poles, end poles, wire, anchors and hardware.  For example, my best calculations show that for this 6 acre planting we will need a bit over 70 miles of wire for the trellis.  To put that in perspective, the winery is 68 miles from Baltimore's BWI Airport which is a good hour and a half away.  Estimated start date for planting is May 1st so I'm on track.    

Hope everyone has a Happy New Year!

Well, we are almost at the end of harvest, the older Cabernet Sauvignon is still left to pick.  I know it has been a while since my last post and it may have been interesting for me to give a play by play of the harvest, maybe not, but I didn't, sorry.  Lots of the past 3 weeks were spent just trying to get everything done.

Having said all of that, I think we grew some pretty wonderful grapes, they certainly smell yummy fermenting away!  We for sure got lucky with the long sunny fall and relative lack of rain both of which kept grape maturity slowly chugging along with warm days and cool nights.

The vineyard part of this vintage may be almost over but the hard work in the cellar is about mid-way through.  My winery colleagues Angel and Rebecca are deep into pump-overs and punch-downs of the reds and racking and barreling whites.

It seems like a long time ago when we were anticipating bud break, the start of the season and wondering how it would all turn out 6 months later.  Somehow it all appears to have worked, now we just take a breath and start all over again, pruning starts after Thanksgiving.      

Our truck picture had been making the social media rounds, over a million views.  I was doing deliveries around Harrisburg yesterday and got a lot of smiles and thumbs-up from my fellow road warriors stuck in traffic on I-83.  It's nice to be the recipient of road joy instead of road rage!

View from my office window

The weather outlook for this week looks perfect.  Slight chance of rain tomorrow but otherwise we just break 70, dry and beautiful clear skies which is all perfect for ripening grapes!  My friends in CA might even be jealous.  We have a small amount of Pinot Noir which we may pick on Wednesday so we will see how prepared we are on the crush pad.  Harvest is about to start!

Cheers!

Keeping our feathered friends from the Franc

We missed pretty much all of the rain that passed through the area over the weekend so the vineyard is continuing to benefit from this great Indian Summer weather, dry and warm!  So far no disease or rot and we have netted almost all of the vineyard without the birds having discovered us.  Because of the slow start in the spring harvest will probably be delayed a week or two so there is plenty of time for things to happen but right now we are in great shape.