I went through the vineyard and checked every graft in order to get a feeling for how everything went. In general the development has been much slower than last year. There are some of the buds that have broken in the last few days, 7 weeks after grafting. This is much slower than last year. Especially the South Block with the Chardonnay is much slower and less vigorous than the rest.

Here is an example of the graft that is 7 weeks old and just now had bud break. In the Chardonnay block it was poor performance all over, but it looks like it could still improve with more bud break happening later.

Clone 459

The re-grafted 8 vines are not looking good, only 4 of them are looking good. 144 vines were grafted and 20 are not looking good now, that is an 86% success rate right now.

Old Block

100 vines grafted and 10 are not looking good, 90%.

Some of the grafts seem to have taken well initially but then dried out and not successful.

Foxtrot 115 Clone

We grafted 624 vines and 44 of them are now not looking good but the rest are looking fine. This would be a success rate of 92.9%. It had quite a lot of suckers that we took away around June 8.

This area also have some grafts that just had bud break. But most of them had quite extensive growth both of grafts and suckers.

Reimer Clone

39 questionable out of 527 grafts. That would be 92.6%. Very vigorous growth.

Chardonnay

This is not looking good at the moment but I am hoping that there will be more bud break happening later. Very sparse growth and not that much suckers. Most of the bud break has happened in the past few weeks, 7 weeks after the grafting?!

Right now we have 848 grafts and 275 not successful (at least not yet) for a 67.6% success.

Clone 95: problems with 22 of 147 for 85%

Clone 72: Problems with 45 of 152 for 70.4%

Clone 548: Problems with 132 of 334 for 60.5%

Clone 75: Problems with 76 of 215 for 64.7%

Hopefully this will improve in the next few weeks/

Based on the great results from last years test grafting of 224 vines from Pinot Gris to Pinot Noir Clone 459, I decided to graft everything over to have the whole vineyard only Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Only 3 vines from last year did not take, and 5 where grafted with the wrong budwood. In March, when we did the pruning of the newly grafted vines, I took a bunch of budwood from the 459 area and stored it at the cool storage at Lake Breeze. We re-grafted the 8 failed ones from last year and made an additional 3 rows (144 vines). There is now a total of 368 vines of clone 459.

This is from April 26, when the grafting was done. The bud break is starting on the re-grafted clone 459.

I also took cuttings from my existing Pinot Noir block and grafted them over on the Merlot vines that were next to the Pinot block. 100 vines where and there is now a total of 1,450 vines of the “Old Block”.

I also took cuttings from the Foxtrot vines and grafted 13 rows of Pinot Gris (624 vines) over to the “Foxtrot Clone 115”

In March, I went up to Kelowna and got cuttings from my friend Doug Reimer’s vineyard. He has a mix of clone 667, 777 and 115 brought in directly from France. The Merlot block at my vineyard was grafted over to this mix of his clones, a total of 527 vines.

The Southern Pinot Gris block was grafted to Chardonnay, 3 clones from Coolshanagh Vineyard, where Foxtrot made what I think the best Chardonnay they’ve made in 2011. We grafted 147 vines over to Clone 95, 334 vines to Clone 548 and 215 over to Clone 75. I also got some of the old Shot Wente Clone (Clone 72) and grafted 152 vines over to that.