Arrow Lake White wine wins Gold Medal

Wow...we just found out that our Arrow Lakes White wine won a Gold Madal at the Winemaker International Ameteur Wine competition in Vermont, USA. We are really pleased with this as this is the worlds largest ameteur wine competition and a great follow up to the Gold medal our Marechal Foch won last year.

We submitted our 2016 vintage as we wanted to see what the jugment would be on a 2 year old bottle. This is a really nice wine when it is new and fresh and we have found it holds these qualities.

We blogged about the 2016 Arrow Lakes White wine, click here to read more about it. http://houseofvines.blogspot.ca/2017/03/arrow-lakes-white-for-2016.html

Bud Break 2018

I always am excited at this time of year to see how the vines are doing and as the buds push you get the first sense of what the season could be. One thing we did this year was prune a lot of the varieties to 4 bud spurs rather than long canes. The droughty summer last year was so hot and dry we suspected the buds further up the cane would not have been as well developed or as fruitful or that we may get more cane dieback than usual. As it turns out it wasn' that bad but we did get more cane dieback.

As the buds push out further and expose the tiny flower clusters you get a further sense of the fruit potential for the year and can start to vision the green pruning we may need to do to adjust the crop load. So far things look mostly good. Unfortunately we may have lost some of the new vines planted last summer to the intense heat and then the winters crushing snow the ripped many young trunks off their trellis canes. Great thing about own rooted vines vs grafted is even if the vine above the soil gets damaged..the roots can send up a new cane and we can train those up the trellis.

So here are some of the vines budding out so far.

Ravat 34 with long spurs in the back ground

Evangeline with flower clusters emerging and showing a secondary bud at the bottom (This secondary will come off in the green pruning we do)

New Vines - L'Acadie Blanc

Like everything else this spring we are late planting the latest truanch of vines. Finally we are getting the nice weather and we can get the vines in the ground.

It was a beautiful day for planting and you can see the latest rows planted in the bottom right corner of the photo.

The new vines are L'Acadie Blanc. These vines were created in Canada, are widely grown in Nova Scotia, and are fungal resistant and cold hardy. It produces a beautiful white wine that can be made in various styles.

In a few years these will be mature and producing beautifully.