Vine name: Yemima
Age: 2 years old
Variety: Mencia
Location: 1st in 1st Row
Sponsored by: Maya Reuven
April 2023
This month, we are thrilled to witness the resurgence of our vines as they come back to life. It is an exciting time as we observe their gradual blooming, and soon we will be undertaking the essential task of green pruning. During this process, we will meticulously select the best shoots to remain while removing the rest.
In addition, we remain vigilant against worms that seek to consume our flowers, and clearing out any unwanted herbs is a top priority. To preserve the natural integrity of our vineyard, we refrain from using herbicides, thereby ensuring that our wines represent the unique terroir of the region.
On this misty morning of April 5th, you can witness the delicate emergence of spring flowers as the surrounding grass remains low, imparting vital nutrients to the budding blooms while also preventing the growth of unwanted herbs.
These pictures were taken on April 14th. As you can see, the shoots are still relatively small at this stage. Keep scrolling to check out some more snaps of Yemima. Notice that we left a lower shoot as a backup plan, just in case things go wrong when we start forming the cordon. We haven't done any green pruning yet, as we didn't feel like it was the right moment. But we'll be back in May and see how we feel about it then.
This is a beautiful sunset we shared with Yemima on the 18th of April at 08:52pm. We straightened her on the pole to get some more sunlight and got rid of lower bushes that were giving shade to this low lane (or Rega) Yemima leads.
May 2023
We came back to the vineyard on mid May with our tags, and Yemima got tagged with not just one but two tags; one with her name and a second one with her vine number in our vineyard which is number 38.
We had to tie her up again to the pole as she was lying on the floor and her shoots were all growing on a side, which is not what we want for Yemima.
It´s very impressive to see how many grape clusters Yemima is growing , last year she had no grapes as it was her first year in our vineyard but this year we will be harvesting Yemima and she´ll be part of our wine like any other vine :)
We also had to do some green prunning but since she had been lying down on the floor, now that she is standing straight, all of her shoots are on a side and its harder to understand which shoots are best to keep.
We still did some green prunning on the shoots we thought weren´t necessary. Make sure you turn the sound on while watching the videos as you will be able to hear some of the reasoning we went through while doing it.
Now it´s time for Yemima to keep growing her grape clusters while we keep spraying her with copper based sulfats to prevent diseases like Mildew which can happen easily at this time of the year were there´s a lot of rain followed by sun and warm weather.
June 2023
End of May and beginning of June were very rainy in our area and in Spain in general. This is the time when flowering occurs, and we are not too sure if this was good for the flowering stage, as pollen propagates worse in rainy situations.
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It is also commonly said that during the flowering stage, we should leave the vines be and not touch or green prune them, and that's exactly what we did.
This video was taken on the 9th of June, and we are impressed to see the numerous grape clusters Yemima has formed. We should remember that Yemima lay on the ground throughout the spring season, so she is adapting to staying upright. That might explain why we can observe some leaves with darker colors on their edges. We should research about this and consider green pruning them soon.
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