We’ll be adding a new vineyard site for 2009. Located at 1300 feet off Alpine Road near Summit Road this is a 7 year old vineyard of Pinot Noir.
We’re calling it Vista Verde, after the small development of houses it’s located in.
The vineyard is on a steep slope and is just over 1 1/4 acres. Total yield should be about 1 ton this year and 1 1/2 -2 tons long term. The trellis is a good VSP 5 wire system.
There was a landscaping crew there when we stopped by putting in some native ground cover. You can see the slope of the vineyard well in this picture.
There was frost on the ground. This will be a cool site for us. Just right to get Pinot Noir ripe. The vineyard is just about 2 miles from Chaine d’Or, although it’s on a separate ridge line so driving between the two takes about 20 minutes.
Here’s the vista in Vista Verde.
The vineyard has a good drainage system in place and is paved from top to bottom which should make working in it just a little easier for us.
There are about 15 dead plants we need to replace, and some poor pruning and training we need to correct, but over all the vineyard is in good shape. We expect a smaller yield this year as we fix the training and pruning on about 100 plants. Most will be ‘do overs’. On those we will restart the cordons from the trunk, and those plants will only have 1-2 clusters instead of 8-10. Next year though they will be ready to produce back at normal levels.