In this third part to Silvia’s season long wine adventure, she reports on the status of her vines, what she learned about vine maintenance and how to plant new grapes. read part I ¦ read part II

Spring finally arrived.

When the rain weather travels from the west toward Graubünden, there is a good chance the rain drops will never fall in Malans…or at least wait until the evening. This is the typical weather pattern in the Bündner Herrschaft and for once the weather did what was expected. Even though rain covered most of Switzerland, we were able to enjoy the warm spring sun.

A quick inspection of the vineyard told me what I needed to immediately know – our vines made it through the winter…and I did too. The vines looked strong and full of growth. The year’s early spring weather caused the vines to bud early, but the subsequent cold weather caused everything to return to normal by mid-May. But even so, some growers have compared the 2009 crop with 2003 and 2007, when everything was early.

As I walked the vineyard and came upon my row of vines, I noticed the few branches on each vine grew into bushes. There were also many little grape bunches visible…a joy to see.

Letting nature do what it wants means losing control of the vines and giving enemies a chance to attack. So after pruning and selecting two branches per vine in the winter, then binding them to the wire at the end of winter, it is now time to keep the vine’s new growth under control.    More...

We are very excited to be back up and running...and we do apologize for the recent downtime!

As you may have noticed by now, we have changed our look and feel a bit to go along with some greatly improved security measures.  We hope you like our look...but, we're not done yet!  We will continue to make some adjustments to the design during the next couple of months and fix any necessary bugs we happen to catch (be sure to send us a message if you see anything weird or if something doesn't appear to work correctly).

In the meantime, here are a few new items we've added to the right sidebar:

1. Improved searching: want to find something fast...type in a term in the field.

2. An historical monthly list of our posts...pretty easy to figure out.

3. Recent comments from our posts...got something to write about a post...it will also appear here!

4. A link to some other blogs we like to follow...send us a message with your blog information if you would like us to consider adding it to the list.

5. Want to get notified when we make a new post?...well, just put your e-mail address into the field and click on the 'notify me' button...we will send you an e-mail message with a link to the new post - it works nicely, but you have to make sure to adjust your spam filter to allow mail from freshattitude (oh...we won't be sharing your address with anyone, or using it for any other reason).

Ok...that covers the main stuff.  Now, back to posting information about food & wine...