Lochaber Estates Vineyard
499 West Lochaber Road Antigonish, NS, Canada

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone. The lake is very quiet this weekend, sometimes it feels like we are the only ones here. The vineyard has certainly filled in way better than ever expected. Keeping up with the mowing has been impossible. It is fall so in vineyards all across NS they are monitoring the sugar and PH levels of their grapes to get to the right balance that winemakers want. A delicate dance as it is a race to ripen grapes before the frost, racoons and birds at this ti...me of the year. As we are a new planting we don't have a harvest this year, but as part of our first experimental planting we let a few plants produce some grapes so we could check sugar levels and compare them to others. Including comparing to Rico's old planting down the road. I'm happy to report we have a sugars at the 16% Brix level in our Riesling, compared to 12% in Rico's chardonnay and 15% in his Marechal Foch. I'm not sure our PH is where a winemaker would want it yet, but maybe a few more days and cold nights will convert the acids to sugars.

We have a few gigantic puffball mushrooms that have appeared in the vineyard! Apparently these are edible... anyone want to try?

Good morning from the vineyard!! This week we finished pruning and tying all the new vines to their stakes. While we are thankful for the rain, keeping up with mowing and weeding is a challenge!

Beautiful day in the vineyard... not because of the weather or the view but we finally finished stringing all the trellis wire we need for this year. Now we move onto pruning, training and irrigation.

Well we have finished pounding in the 700+ posts that make up our trellis work! Thanks again to Parker and Paul for all your tremendous help. Thanks to the neighbors as well for putting up with the noise. We are now onto quieter work.

Some days just go like this.

So far we have strung 3.4 km of wire for the Vineyard trellises. We only have another 11 km to go!

The irony of putting together the irrigation system in the pouring rain is not lost on me.

Hey look we got a new culvert today... some things are more exciting than watching plants grow.

Working hard this morning. Thanks to Parker and Paul!

Finally! The supplies for the trellis work have arrived. They've been held up by the great COVID-19 lumber shortage which meant our grape stakes hadn't been milled at the lumber yard. Thanks to Tony at Feltmate & Son Enterprise Service Center for coming over with his tractor on short notice to help us unload. To all the neighbors, we apologize in advance for the sound of the post pounder as our friend Parker sets to work to install these 900 posts.

Spent the morning pruning. Always bothers me to have to cut off canes which are growing vigorously. We have at least one model vine that the others should aspire to look like.