Winter activities in the vineyards

Winter rest is budding

Hibernating gems

With winter rest is meant the period of inactivity of the vegetative apparatus, due to excessively low temperatures (we consider that the minimum temperature for vegetative activity is around 10 ° C) in which we proceed to the selection of the buds for the following year with pruning.

This period elapses, physiologically speaking, from the complete fall of the leaves to tears.
In this period of time the buds are defined as hibernating and have within them three vegetative apexes, including the central one and the most developed as the only fertile and bearer of bunches (they are already present inside the bud together with some leaves!).

Weeping

With the rise of temperatures during spring, radical activity is reactivated and lymphatic movement is noted with the release of lymph from the pruning cuts, this period is precisely defined as "weeping".

In conjunction with the crying there is the beginning of the development of the bud with the phase of "cottony bud" which presents precisely a cottony swelling that still protects it from the cold.

We then move on to the open gem with the exit of the main apex commonly known as the "green tip", in this phase the plant is highly sensitive to morning frosts and frosts that could affect the fertile vegetative apex and therefore compromise the entire production.

The enemies of the vines

In this period the attacks of two animal parasites occur:
     • thrips of the vine
     • Nottua

The thrips of the vine

The thrip is a small Tisanottero (less than a millimeter) that winters at the adult stage in the roughness of the wood.

At the germination, it is carried on the newly originated shoots, on which the trophic activity begins, by laying inside the newly formed plant tissues, from here a necrotic zone originates in which develops the first generation of larvae that flies between May and June.

The damage to the vegetation occurs with deformation of the branches and leaflets near the insect activity.
This adversity is monitored by the application of blue chromotropic traps.

The night

The noctua is a medium-sized moth (50-60 mm wingspan) that hibernates at the larva stage of the last age within the soil.

With the arrival of spring, food comes out and resumes, at the expense of the enlarged buds that are blinded and of the young shoots that are destroyed.

In mid-April they reach maturity to give adults flying around the end of May.
The second generation flies to the adult stage in late June.

Being a very visible damage the monitoring is carried out without the aid of traps and in the case of intervention we proceed to manually harvest the larvae during the night when they escape from the ground to feed.