Heaven sent
How procrastination can drive decision-making
Before we start, I would like to ask you a favour – it won’t take long and it’ll really help us out...if you can do it for us TODAY please (the deadline is tomorrow 20 May)!
Portugal’s main tourism and hospitality association AHRESP has shortlisted us for a media award for our podcast series Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure.
We’re in the final five and the winner is decided by popular vote. Please could you vote for us? This is how to do it…
You just need to click here, put in your name and email address (so they know we’re not cheating), we are the third category (“Media & Comunicação no Turismo”) and we’re the first choice on the list.
Click on us, scroll down and admit to not being a robot before clicking the big button to register your vote.
Oh, and if you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, you can find it here, or in all the usual places.
Thanks! Now…what was I going to say again…
Leaving the leaves
They say procrastination is the thief of time, but in our naïve world of planting a vineyard it’s also an excellent decision making strategy.
Well, for the moment, at least.
It took us a little longer than expected to get all the vines into the ground, and I was more than a little worried they’d spent too long soaking in the bath…waiting in the water for us to get around to getting them in the ground.
You can read all about my excitement when their buds first started to appear, and ever since then, the tiny sectionsof Castelão, Arinto and Alvarinho grapes grafted onto their long American root stocks, have been forming into leaves, and sending out tendrils to grasp their bamboo supports and drag them up towards the sun.
Vinhas das Estrelas
We were told it might be two or three weeks before they awoke from their deep sleep.
But the big unknown has been how much water to give them.
The whole point of preparing the land the way we did was to give them the best possible start in life.
The deep trenches we cut through the soil were to open up the hard crust of clay and encourage their roots to head down straight away.
Giving them loads of water on the surface was not going to encourage them to go looking…and so the balance of opinion has swayed from watering to waiting it out.
Their first watering was dramatic. We piled so much water into the plants to force any traces of air from around the roots, and with such deep trenches it’s not surprising the land soaked up a small lake (or at least the first few centimetres of ours!).
Here’s the whole story of our land preparation and wine planting…through the medium of film…
But the next taxing question was when to give them water again.
We had conflicting advice over this one - some saying we should regularly water them to keep the young, struggling plants alive; others told us to leave them…and only intervene if their leaves started to wilt.
Were they really sagging or was this some fiction worthy of Wilt Disney?
Scary stuff keeping 1,000 little plants alive.
I was frozen like the rabbit we don’t want to see stuck in our headlights (rabbits like to eat young vines).
Each day I inspected the leaves…was that one sagging slightly? Did that one look sick? Were they all going to die? I rigged up the rest of the irrigation…separating off a section for the new trees we planted nearby…for watering separately.
I asked, I listened, I pondered, I did…nothing.
And then it rained.
Procrastination: one, Active Decision making: nil.
It was a proper soaking…unusual for May in Portugal, but mostly at night and so was beneficial both to our guests and to our vineyards.
And most importantly it puts off my decision making for another few weeks.
For now I can sleep and not have nightmares about shrivelled plants screaming for water (I haven’t yet, but I can seeing it heading that way).
But with the temperatures heading for 30 Celsius this week, and summer fast approaching, it’s not going to be long before I have to balance doing what’s best for the babies and stressing them to grow south, or throwing them out with too much bathwater.
And finally…
In other news, our first Wine Retreat was a stunning success!
In collaboration with the Hutchins Wine Academy we welcomed a dozen wannabe wine aficionados to the Valley of the Stars and had a wonderful weekend of wines and wanderings and stories and samplings.
We poured and we paired, we drank and we shared…and before I slip deeper into poetry…here’s a post all about it that I’ve just written in my other Substack blog: Off-Grid and Entertaining in Portugal.
And the great news: we’re doing it all again in early October!
Do let me know if you’re interested in joining…we’re working on the finer points and tweaking a few things before we open it up for bookings (but feel free to get in there early!)
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