Getting closer to harvest!

The weather has been beautiful and it looks like harvest could be just a week away! That means we get to eat the grapes during our vineyard walks -- yumm! Actually, they're not as sweet as we like them but we can't help ourselves to munch on them already. We've soooo much been looking forward to it!

Gearing for harvest means a lot of activity in the vineyard and also in the cellar -- getting new equipment like tanks, tractors, lights for night harvesting, an additional forklift, and also healthy drinks & lunches for our team! 

In our 'Stony Block' the grapes are almost ready -- Chico devoured quite a few! Bonita is more picky & thought they were not ripe enough	We loved driving our new UTV, this fancy John Deere Gator! Tony taught us how to drive it so we can help him at harvest ...

On the sad side, we have been having quite a problem with gophers this season. Being organic, we cannot use poison (and we wouldn't use poison anyhow, as we feel it's not the right thing to do for the land) but only traps, which take a lot longer to place and collect the pesky animals that devour our vines -- and the workload has been so high that the vineyard team couldn't take the time to put the traps in the Doña Margarita Vineyard -- and we lost 12 vines in a week!

Here's one of the dead vines from the gophers. It's so sad! We saw the vineyard team feel really terrible to see their work destroyed like that	You can see here, right, that the gophers ate the roots clean -- wish we could have gotten to those mean animals and killed them ourselves!