Gordon Brothers Family Vineyards & Wines Blog

It's been a blustery week! Here's the week 3 photo.

Week 3 - 5/4/2010

Amazing growth in one week even with the cool weather!

Week 1 - 4/20/2010

Here is a short video showing field preparation for our organic watermelons. Notice the vineyard in the background!

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Starting today, we will be taking weekly photos of the same Chardonnay vine so you can see the progress. It's amazing the changes that happen in one short week!

Spring came early this year as we saw close to record high temperatures in early March. We scrambled to finished pruning the grapes by the end of March in anticipation of an early bud break…it usually takes about 3 weeks to accomplish this once we get started and weather permitting. As bud break on the cherries approached in late March the weather turned and the wind became a constant. This made it rather challenging for the bees to do their job of pollinating the cherry trees.

We use approximately 100 bee hives to pollinate all 30 acres of organic sweet cherries. We are anxiously awaiting the verdict whether or not we have a good cherry crop. As far as the grapes are concerned bud break occurred in early April with the Chardonnay and the other varieties will be close to follow.

We dodged a bullet last week as nighttime temperatures plummeted to nearly 25 degrees F…these kinds of temperatures can kill exposed fruit buds if certain frost protection strategies are not implemented and executed properly. Other current events on the farm include getting the irrigation systems up and running, fertilizing, weed control, field work in preparation for organic sweet corn planting and field preparation of the ground where we will be planting organic watermelons this year.