First job in the vineyard

Early this morning our new neighbour, Bruce, came over to show us how to take the nets off the vines. His neighbour, Murray, also came on his tractor with a trailer carrying his invention that made removing the nets easier.

Before

Bruce did the first net for us then James did the other four.  It only took about an hour and was made much easier with Murray’s invention.

James bagging the nets

The grapes are still on the vines as they hadn’t really been looked after by the previous owner and hadn’t ripened enough to make wine. They should have been thinned out so there were too many grapes. 

We have decided to swap some of the red vines for white. We have 420 vines – all Syrah (Shiraz). We are going to replace half of them with Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc so we have a mixture of red and white.

Bruce is going to look into grafting the white vine cuttings onto the roots of the red. The roots are well established and this should give us a good crop of white sooner.

The next thing we have to learn is how to prune the vines. Bruce is going to show us how to do that in a couple of weeks when all the leaves have dropped off.

After

Ned inspecting our work