Wines I'm Making: 2017 First Sulfur Spraying

Today I finally got around to spraying the grapes with sulfur for the first time this season (2017). I'd delayed in part because we had had so much rain that it seemed pointless to spray. Last week I thinned the shoots on the vines and a few days ago I persuaded my neighbor to remove part of the row of cedar trees right behind our little vineyard that has shaded the grapes more and more each year—to the extent that our yields were getting very low and it was hard to keep mildew away even with careful sulfur spraying. The rows are now getting a lot more sun again. I'm hoping that we'll have a substantial harvest this year for the first time in several years. In a related note, I opened a bottle of the 2014 wine. It's very good. The best we've ever made. The 2015 Cabernet will be bottled very soon. We got so few grapes in 2016 that there will be no 2016 Cabernet. I mixed the Cabernet and Sangiovese grapes we did harvest and made rosé from the lot of it.