The harbinger of Spring for most people seems to be the Robin, the red-breasted songbird that gives indication that the cold weather is subsiding and the flora will begin budding soon.  For us here at Satek Winery, the return of the Robins signals the first chapter of the new vineyard season: pruning.

We are getting a later start on our pruning this year, due to the multiple heavy snows we've gotten in February.  Our team will spend the next two months in the vineyards, conducting one of the most important preparations they can do to ensure an optimal growing season.  First, they will pre-prune, where they will cut back the obvious overgrowth before the vines begin to bud.  After buds begin to form, they will go back through and meticulously prune each vine.  This process is very labor-intensive, as they count a designated number of desired buds (usually ranging from 40-60 per vine, depending on variety) and remove the remaining so that the vine will yield better fruit and to encourage deeper root growth.  They try to select evenly spaced buds so the fruit will be easier to harvest, leaving more buds on the top wires than lower wires to help facilitate photosynthesis by not having too many clusters under the canopy.  They also spend time retraining some vines that have become detached from their trellises. 

Even with all this work, Mother Nature can still wreak havoc on the vineyard.  Last year is a good example: we got a deep frost on May 10, which destroyed most of the primary buds on the vines.  Luckily, grapevines will produce secondary buds when that happens; but these new buds will yield a much smaller quantity of fruit.

Fred Barnes, who has done much of our vineyard management over the past several years, is enamored with his work: "Watching the growth cycle of grape development and maturation is pretty miraculous.  They are very resilient- their root structure reaches 7 to 8 feet into the ground.  They are built with this DNA to survive, and survive anything."