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For me, 1103p is the bulldozer of rootstocks it overcomes every obstacle you put in front of it it’s a workhorse alongside St George pretty bulletproof and 1103p is resistant to sharpshooters as well. I will add that overall the vines on SO4 have been more productive but that is expected as SO4...

It is usually done manually we do our fermentations in Macrobins and will do punch down in the bins 3x a day with a steel punch down tool. I like a lot of punch downs to minimize risk of microbial cap growth and to extract more color and tannins for longer aging.

No it likes dry meager soils it does well in sandy soils it’s okay with moderate wetness but it will rot and get crown galls easily in damp conditions this comes from experience with it I’ve had a lot of problems with it in regards to root rot in damp soils and disease and crown gall

SO4 tends to like dry soil it doesn’t like wet soils but it also suffers from sensitivity to magnesium deficiency

SO4 is a good vigorous rootstock, very rapid growth even when young I had vines make fruit the second year no matter how many times I removed it they really wanted to get going!

Nice I’ll take a look. Also big tip the best yeast for Zinfandel in my opinion is RP-15.

Zinfandel is my favorite red grape since we don’t do Zinfandel at the winery I have a local contact I get Zinfandel fruit from and make a batch for friends and family on the side yearly absolutely fantastic grape if you know how to work with it. It has a lot of quirks, the brix is an issue...

Nice choice, if I was planting a white grape vineyard for a winery I would do Marsanne or Roussane really popular choices and grow well.

It’s a good rootstock for basically any kind of soil. It is tricky though as it has some quirky habits. Generally speaking most of my vineyard is planted on 1103 Paulsen which does excellent here but I have actually found vines on SO4 to yield better and set fruit a little better.

My Malbec tends to be a little wild and weird because it’s on 5BB kober and will grow funky canes and need to be trimmed and fixed every other year and will alternate from heavy yield to light yield and sometimes won’t produce at all 5BB is a weird rootstock.

Both depends on the varietal though

That means the vines are awake and moving nutrients up for new top growth if they bleed it’s a good thing and will prevent infections in the cuts you make by bleeding sap to remove contaminants and protect wounds.

Looks nice and healthy lol.

All of my grapes have started budbreak although several are at the full on vegetation stage at this point the sluggish vines are budded out but not as developed yet. Nebbiolo, Blaufrankisch and Carmenere were the first 3 to get going early February.

Let me just say congrats on starting a new winery, I started a winery with a friend in 2023, we processed 13 tons of grapes last year and will do 30 ish this fall. We don’t own our own vineyard we have a contract with another winery for grapes because we wanted to save costs on managing a...

RP-15 is the best Zinfandel yeast

You can buy them at garden stores or on Amazon. I find Amazon to be great. Also mancozeb can be used at 30 day to harvest intervals in a couple states California and Oregon to my knowledge.

Budbreak has been all over the place in my vineyard as well as a couple of vineyards I manage. 2021 was as late as April, 2022 was particularly late and then delivered pretty much no grapes at all for anyone in the area which is why nobody has a 2022 vintage. 2023 I recall being early to mid...

Grasshoppers can be an irritating pest

Dang yeah that explains it lol