Vineyards activities

The journey of quality wine starts with quality grapes. Wine with its own distinctive character and uniqueness, created by our vineyards. The vines are grown with love and care – day after day, season after season and year after year.

During this period the vines are pruned. Pruning is done manually and with a single-arm Guyot formation, modified by the Simonit & Sirch method. The advantage of this method is that the shoots are evenly distributed on the structure, which provides better heating and ventilation of leaves and bunches, provides a balance between number and size of bunches, achieves optimal ratio between the mass of grapes and the area of leaf mass. The Simonit & Sirch method gives additional advantages – shaping the vines in sync with the natural branches of perennial wood and the main path of sap flow.

In March we perform a detailed inspection of the vineyards in order to remove damaged structural elements, torn fasteners and monitor whether each vine is firmly fixed and well stabilized.

The thermometer is permanently fixed above 10 ° C. Spring comes and thus begins the growing season. The sap of the vine starts, the buds appear. During this period we manually remove the non-fruiting shoots, which would extract energy from the fruiting ones. The soil is ploughed by an intercept machine that removes weeds near the stem of the vine.

Depending on the grape variety, flowering is observed between late May and early June. Tillage is not carried out during this period.

After flowering, we remove the shoots when there are more than 10 on the vines.

Summer comes and every vine forms bunches. It’s time for green pruning. This operation is done manually in order to prevent the bunches from touching each other when there are too many of them on the vine. In addition to preventing disease, this operation also achieves a better quality. Green pruning is also performed for better ventilation of the vines.

The grapes ripen, pass through the “pea” phase. This is followed by a “verasion” phase, during which the skins become colored, the accumulation of colour begins, sugars rise and acids decrease.

It is August. The temperatures are high, the ripeness of the grapes is in an advanced stage. Tillage operations stop and we are waiting for the harvest.
It’s time to take samples from the grapes in order to monitor the physiological and technological maturity of the grapes. When the grapes are ready, we proceed to the grape harvest.

Harvesting is organized in the early hours of the day to use the natural lower temperatures. The grapes are harvested entirely by hand in crates of 10-12 kg and are transported from the vineyard, weighed, chilled in a refrigerator for 24 hours and delivered to Downtown Urban Winery.
Harvesting is done according to the maturity of each grape variety.

The grape harvest is over. Temperatures are falling. The soil is ploughed in order to be properly aerated. This operation creates air pockets that provide the movement of oxygen, water and nutrients needed for the root system of the vine.

The leaf mass turns yellow-brown and slowly begins to fall. The vines are preparing for winter.