For the past 3 years Alta Marfa has consistently given me a feeling of being pulled in two directions at once.

At the end of 2016, we finally purchase the property that would become the vineyard. On one hand there was a lot of excitement, but on the other hand we still would have to wait years before we would have any wine to sell. In 2018 we worked extremely hard, scrambling like crazy, to get 6,000 vines planted. Once the vines were in the ground though, we would still have to wait years before we would have wine to sell. Several months later when we realized that most of the 6,000 vines we had just worked so hard to plant would never grow and never produce grapes. I felt I had failed. It was devastating. But at the end of the day we would still have to wait years before we would be able to produce wine.

Now we are about to embark on another whirlwind of planting another 6,000 vines during the month of April. We are more prepared than we were last year and we are super excited to put everything we have learned into practice, but at the same time we will still have to wait years before we will have any wine to share with you all. Starting to see a pattern?

You might be thinking “yea, the pattern is we are never going to get any wine!” We will all have to be patient together.

Vine planting starts in only 3 weeks! We are very excited that we have even more planting participants scheduled than we had last year. There is still time to join in the fun! Send me an email if you are interesting in coming out to the vineyard to help plant vines on a weekend in April.

We have been working hard every weekend since January to get everything ready and this post will show you what we have been doing. Special thanks to Promit and Paulina for all their contributions over the last few months. Couldn’t have done it without you guys!

The Alta Marfa vineyard will feature head trained vines (think gnarly bonsai tree looking vines) rather than trellised vines (think wires). In order to train the vines into the little tree shapes, each vine is tied to its own stake and trained up that. Over the past few months we have hammered in thousands (nearing 6,000) wooden stakes by hand.

We had 12 pallets of hardwood stakes, each pallet weighing 1,800 lbs. Thats a LOT of stakes.

Putting stakes into the steeper part of the hillside is particularly challenging because of how rocky it is.

Katie, Melissa and I taking a break from hammering in stakes.

I bought a new slide hammer for driving in posts and in only about 5 minutes I got it caught on the top of a post and bashed myself on the head with it.

Because we were in such a rush last year to prepare for planting the first vines, there were a lot of housekeeping type things that were just left undone. We have been able to get a lot of things tidied up over the past few months.

I have never felt more like a pirate than this moment. We got some heavy duty straps to make sure the tent doesn’t blow away. During the winter and spring we routinely have 30-40 mph winds.

This a 70 degree day in January. We were pretty sure this snow had been sitting here in the shade for about two weeks. Alta Marfa is a strange place.

Walking around the five acres that will someday be vineyard #2.

Because we are planting during the driest part of the year, the irrigation system is key. (It wasn’t even finished being built when we planted the first vines last year) This year we have fixed the leaks and just sort of made everything better.

Promit and I (mostly Promit) re-built the irrigation manifold which was super leaky all of last season. Now no leaks at all!

This is what happens when your chimney is too short. 12/9/2018 will henceforth be remembered as the day we almost burned down the tent.

Katie and I enjoying a beer hike. (It’s exactly what it sounds like)

Promit and Katie chillin on top of the hill. We found a very nice leaning rock.

We found this super cool spider under a rock while gathering rocks for trail cairns. He is about an inch and a half long.

This is why farming is difficult. Luckily all the vines were still dormant at this point. Many other parts of Texas had already experienced bud break when this cold weather came through.

Shortly after that 20 degree weather at the beginning of March we had our first bud swell ever at Alta Marfa. This is a petite manseng vine that was among the first vines that went into the ground last April.

This is a cool picture of me that Promit took. It has not been retouched.

Next blog post will be post planting so there will be lots of excitement to report back on! Wish us luck!

34. Planting Time is Here! 2019 Edition!