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Vines before pruning at CJS Vineyards & Aurelius Winery.
Vines before pruning at CJS Vineyards & Aurelius Winery.
Vines before pruning at CJS Vineyards & Aurelius Winery.
It’s mid-March. We’ve seen snow storms, ice and cold, then sun and 70-degree days. What more could you ask for in the Finger Lakes?
Spring is definitely in the air. It’s always wonderful to feel the warm sunlight and view clear blue skies when you’re out in the vineyard. We’re pruning our vines right now, removing most of last year’s growth to make way for a new crop. It’s manual work, with hand-pruning shears, requiring knowledge of grape vines and grape growing. We balance-prune our vines, a technique where we have just enough vegetation to allow the grapes to ripen in our growing season. Too much canopy (leaf area) will result in smaller grapes and less clusters. Conversely, too many grape clusters relative to the vine size can damage the vine and never allow the grapes to ripen before the season's end.
We first prune and then weigh the canes. On some of our rieslings we were getting 3 to 4 pounds of pruned wood. We then use a formula to tell us how many buds to leave for this year’s crop, hoping to have the vine balanced and healthy. As the weather warms, the vines start to change from their winter hardiness levels, so bud damage may still occur between 0 and 10 degrees. Hopefully those temperatures are behind us now. We also check the trellis system, tightening any loose wires, and check the vineyard posts. The next step will be bud break, where the buds open and start to leaf out, usually early May.
The BEVNY 2022 (Business, Enology and Viticulture of New York) will be presented virtually March 29-31. On Tuesday we’ll hear about the business part of grape growing and winemaking, and there will be an afternoon session on vineyard pest management. Wednesday is dedicated primarily to winemaking techniques and the use of more climate-friendly, disease-resistant hybrid grapes. On Thursday we’ll review the challenges of the 2021 season and learn more about sustainable grape growing and winemaking practices. It’s an important conference that brings Finger Lakes growers and winemakers together with other New York wine regions, East Coast areas and participants around the world to share information about grape growing and commercial winemaking. Information and registration can be found at bevny.org/register.
Then, in April, the Finger Lakes Grape Program will have the spring IPM (integrated pest management) meeting at Wagner Vineyards in Lodi. I’m really looking forward to this meeting; it will be live in person after a few years of online only. Growers learn about new methods and materials from educators and industry representatives that can help us produce better grapes here in the Finger Lakes while maintaining our great environment.
In our winery, we’re doing some bottling. We recently put the 2019 pinot noir and our dry oaked Cayuga white in the bottle. We like to bottle-age the wines for several months before putting them on sale. We’ve also got a dry rosé, made from pinot noir grapes, that will be released shortly.
We had fun the last Saturday in February celebrating Open That Bottle Night. I found a bottle of 2007 pinot noir in our cellar and for dinner that night we opened it and enjoyed an excellent wine. Wine lovers really don’t need a special day to enjoy an old bottle of wine! So don’t be afraid to open up an old bottle that you may be saving somewhere for a special occasion. As I get older, life really seems to go by quickly, so any day can be a special occasion. Cheers!
Chris Scholomiti is co-owner and winemaker at CJS Vineyards & Aurelius Winery, located at 6900 Fosterville Road, Aurelius. The winery is open in 2022 by appointment for tastings and curbside pickup; please call or text ahead. For more information, questions or comments about the column or wine and grape growing in the Finger Lakes, email wine@cjsvineyards.com or call (315) 730-4619.
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Vines before pruning at CJS Vineyards & Aurelius Winery.
Vines before pruning at CJS Vineyards & Aurelius Winery.
Vines before pruning at CJS Vineyards & Aurelius Winery.
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