It's been a long time, almost 4 years, since our last blog post. During that time, many changes have occurred here at The Vines.
First off, you may have noticed a subtle change to our logo. We dropped “Winery” and replaced it with “Farm”. That doesn't mean we will never have a winery, it just means our plans for opening a winery have been postponed indefinitely.
If we go back 4 years ago to our last flurry of blog posts, you may remember we were very focused on opening up a winery. We had all the plans drawn up and were ready to convert our barn into a winery/tasting room, but then our crops were hit with a fungus that nearly wiped out our vineyard. Add that to the last two years of COVID and we were faced with a combined One/Two punch that made us begin to rethink our destiny.
Back in the summer of 2018, our vineyard was almost devastated by a powdery mildew fungus and Japanese Beetles that wiped out over 60% of our crops. The vineyard is on a comeback, but it may take a few more years before we start to see any fruit on the vines for making wine. As for COVID, well, everyone knows how much fun that 2-year lockdown was.
We'll keep you updated on the status of the vineyard. It's still too early to tell how the vines are going to do this year, but we have hope for them.
As for COVID, it was good for one thing, it got everyone starting to think about attending to their personal lives and looking to the future of being self-sustainable. This brings us to our new focus in life. Our Farm!
We've acquired a few added guests around the vineyard/farm over the past few months. Our new guests include goats, cows, pigs, guinea hens, and chickens!
Our new farm animals have been a lot of fun to have around, they are so spoiled and really love human attention! It's like having thirty dogs running around the farm… Oh, did I forget to mention we still have 6 dogs too!
Our agritourism license has been renewed and we are looking to provide farm visits this year. So watch our website for more details and we'll post more frequently providing updates on the vineyard and farm.
BTW – we still get enough grapes from our vines for producing our own preferred wine selection. In the future, we may even share some of our private reserves with guests on the farm.
I came across this while looking up the band, but I had a great time browsing the website!
Wonderful blog, and you can never have too many dogs.
We could not agree with you more, about the dogs that is!
Thanks for taking the time to read our blog.