Pruning and 4 weeks later

On the last weekend of March the pruning was done, we racked the white wine, and I took lots of nice pictures. Then most of them got deleted when my external HD got confused.  Only a few remainded...

A big pile of small branches:

A small pile of big branches:

A blood red sky at the vinyard:

And then.... last weekend, just 4 weeks later, I got a surprise. All of a sudden it seemed like the season changed and the previously barren-looking vines are covered with opening buds.

This unwelcome cserebogár/cockchafer had his meal interrupted...

Spring has sprung

Not much happens over the winter but now the spring is here the work begins again.  The vines are budding and this weekend I'll get to see how they look. They will be severely cut back to encourage new growth.  Also the wine needs to be racked again. I'm thinking of bottling the red as I'm concerned that once we rack it (it currently fills the barrel right to the top) there will be air inside the barrel which is unlikely to improve its quality over time. For that I'll need to buy a bottling machine, don't know how much that costs yet but might be a good investment.  And of course I'll need about 100 bottles too.

Meanwhile I have a couple of items which severely test my Hungarian language knowledge.

An thriller on video - The ABC of Pruning - something I won't personally be doing!

And a nice old book about grapes and wine:

... this page is about racking:

Ain't nothin' going on but the snow

  

Harvest prediction not good?

St. Vincent’s feast day is January 22. Traditionally, mild weather on St. Vincent’s day lead to good crops.  Unfortunately it was some degrees below zero.   


In some places, on this date a cutting can be made of from a vine and if the buds are not damaged by the freezing winter weather there is good hope for the harvest.

Hungary: Its Fine wines and Winemakers

My wife gave me the book Hungary: Its Fine wines and Winemakers, by David Copp for Christmas. It's got some really excellent depth about the history of wine production in Hungary, grape varieties, and individual growers.

It contains an interesting story about the socialist years. Due to central planning, Russia had the job of producing tractors. These tractors, designed to mechanise wheatlands, were 3.5m wide. Hungarian vineyard rows were less than 2m apart, so to mechanise them and accomodate the tractors, every other row of a vineyard had to be uprooted, to make rows 4m apart. However, since the goals of wine production at that time were focussed on quantity rather than quality, many more vines needed to be planed on lower-quality sites.  The result was the replacement of high-density planting of old vines on the best hillside sites, with low-density plantings of heavy cropping varieties on inferior low-level sites.  The book says that this was considered a successful approach in Party quarters - production quotas were maintained and there were no complaints about the quality of the wine.  Of course, I presume complaining was not recommended in those days!