An independent guide to one vineyard year
This site follows the work of a cool-climate vineyard on a bench below an escarpment, in the order the work happens: pruning in the frozen rows, bud break, the green work of summer, veraison, the pick, and the long wait for the freeze.
There is no growing calendar here in the ornamental sense. Every entry is filed against the point in the year when the decision it describes actually gets made, and every entry states two things plainly: what is being decided, and what it costs to get it wrong. That pairing is the whole editorial idea. A vineyard year is a sequence of removals — buds, shoots, leaves, whole bunches — and the interesting part is always the cost of removing the wrong thing at the wrong time.
How it is organised
Six sections carry twenty-eight entries. The register on the homepage is the spine: twelve rows, one for each month, each naming the operation that defines it and the failure specific to that operation. From any row you can reach the section that covers it, and from any section you can reach every entry inside it. The archive lists all twenty-eight in one place for readers who would rather browse than follow the year around.
The material is written for people who work in or near vineyards, and for people who want to understand why a bottle of cool-climate wine costs what it does. It assumes no particular expertise and does not simplify the decisions.
Independence
The site is paid for by local businesses whose marks appear on the homepage. They are shown the year's coverage when everybody else is: after it publishes. No entry is written, commissioned, edited or withdrawn on their account.