Weather conditions that we would imagine made to order have been favorable to the development of the vine!

After a series of difficult years for avoiding the development of microscopic fungus, with high amounts of downy and powdery mildew in 2007, 2008, and in a lesser amount 2009, the "vegetative" year 2010 has sofar only shown a slight risk of such development.  We hope that our luck holds out...

The day before yesterday brought back beautiful weather allowing flowering to take place evenly and in excellent conditions. We've past the mid-flowering mark for the Merlot, whereas the Cabernet is about 25% in flower. Now we hope to avoid coulure for our Merlot, a phenomenon to which our older vines are especially sensitive. The cooler temperatures and humid days we had last week made us somewhat uneasy, and we'll need to wait another two weeks before we can be completely at ease. These cooler temperatures did help to curb a vegetative growth cycle that had been fairly rapid until now. 

The vine buds bloomed a bit late, April 10th, and the vines are catching up on their late start to the season. In the vineyards, the summer pruning is almost done and our vineyard workers have almost finished the first raising of the vine.



The second raising will begin next week. In the winery, we've just finished the post-fining racking for the 2008.  We'll get ready to bottle the 2008 vintage early in July.