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We wrapped up our 2009 harvest Friday. The chilly weather was balanced by peeks of sun emerging in the afternoon. We've had a great, hard-working crew this year. Many thanks for all your efforts, folks! Now we continue with winemaking...

This is probably a newish sign of spring for Vermont: a greenhouse full of grape cuttings starting to leaf out. All winter, we drag the canes that we prune from the grapevines down to our shop and cut the best bits into 11 inch cuttings. We store these till March, then give them a dip in rooting hormone and mycorrhizal fungi, but them on a heated table for two weeks, then pot them up. Just like magic, little roots start to grow from the base of the cuttings and a week or so later, the buds break and new shoots and leaves appear. It's a beautiful sight to walk into the greenhouse at this time of year and see tables full of baby grape vines growing. We use some of these plants in our own vineyard, and sell the rest. The greenhouse is a taste of what's coming up on a much bigger scale just outside the door -- if we're ready. Time to get to work...

People sometimes ask us what we do in the winter around here. Well, the wine comes first. We have about 18,000 liters of various kinds of wine from the 2008 harvest in tanks. We have to keep a close watch on this wine as it develops, even taste it pretty often. (Yeah, somebody has to do it.) All of the wine goes through process called "cold stabilization" in which the wine is chilled to around 30 degrees for a couple of weeks. This helps to precipitate the cream of tartar which is a natural component of wine. It's less soluble at cold temps, and it forms crystals on the sides of the wine tanks. We do this because it lowers the wine's acidity a little bit which is generally a good thing, and it prevents the formation of crystals in the wine bottle if someone leaves it in the fridge for a while. (The crystals are flavorless and harmless, but unexpected for most people.) This is one time when we have the advantage over California. They have to run expensive chillers to cold stabilize their wines. We just open the doors.

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