Down the Row

Sometimes you just don't worry about the right things, you know? We were sweating out the heat and lack of rainfall (yes, I know, a terrible pun), but what we didn't worry enough about was how hungry all the critters were gettting. As usual, we had a few birds helping themselves to some grapes, but, for the first time ever, we had pretty significant munching going on by the local deer population. Although they weren't eating a lot of fruit - central Texas deer are too small to reach most of our cordons, but they munched many a leaf, increasing the drought pressure on the vines.

What was, unfortunately, a dramatic decimation of our crop, had the pesky racoons to blame. There must be some sort of 'coon mass transit system, because they must have descended on our vineyard in amazing numbers to consume the amount of fruit that they did in such a short period of time. Worse, they came at us from the south end of the vineyard instead of from the wooded area directly across the county road, which has always been the area we have to patrol. We actually had only minor predation on the north side, but they nearly stripped the south end and in some cases reached almost the mid-point of the vineyard. Yet another lesson in grape growing!

Harvest was even more brutal than last year, with unrelenting heat - yeah, I've heard "but it's a dry heat" - which, this year translated to "you'll never be able to drink enough water to stay hydrated". We did, however, get the crop picked, crushed, fermented and in the tank, for which we are very thankful. Now, if we can just get some rain to set the vines up for that big crop next year!

NEWS FLASH! Rain finally broke out over the vineyard - and not just a little shower - with real live thunderstorms pouring much needed rain over the area on Saturday, 8/13/11.