Stomp the grapes.
Three words I cannot wait to say but alas, that won’t be a reality for a few more years. We all know what they say about a fine wine…it takes time.
Patience is not a gift God blessed me with and He reminds me of how hard I need to work at it, everyday. This vineyard is the ultimate test (besides children) of patience.
However, those three words are way closer to me now than they were 6 months ago when this vineyard dream began. For those who aren’t familiar my instagram or aren’t YouTube watchers, I created a whole video explaining the backstory of the vineyard along with all the details. Click here for the story. (P.S. Please give the video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel.) I try to post on instagram and youtube as much my time allows.
In the spirit of patience, let’s take a quick look back at where we started. This way you can see the full scope of where we are in today’s update.
Before any work 
Digging the holes for the orchard 
Post going in for the grapes!
As you can see, the vineyard wasn’t all that magical at it’s conception. But let’s be real, nothing great ever starts out great. Thats what makes it great in the end, duh.
But after months and months of research, getting our hands dirty, and I mean dirty, trial and error, doing and redoing and a whole lot of patience, we now have this!
From a far it may not seem like much but Finnerty Farms has come a long way! The biggest difference is obviously the grass. I never knew I would have such an affection for grass, but sure enough, I do. It seems so simple but actually getting grass to grow when you have no water source and are going in and out of droughts/torrential downpours is very frustrating, not to mention disheartening.
Never the less, we perservered.
Maybe more important than grass (wink wink) is the grapes! They are the star of the show, of course. Again, for a little back story, my family in Italy have their own winery, bed & breakfast and wine label, Podere Marcampo. It’s nestled in the beautiful Tuscan city of Volterra. Their wines are fantastic and you can never go wrong with a family owned and operated company, especially one that is as passionate as they are. So, when it came time to planting our own grapes we had the idea of incoorprating their stellar vines into our tiny operation. They were so gracious and sent us some of their best selling wine grape cuttings for us to graft to ours.
Muscadine grape vines
If you aren’t familiar with grafting then it is basically attaching one plant variety to a different plant. You can do this with just about any plant. In fact, most of the plants/trees you see are grafted to a rootstock of a different variety anyway. Fruit trees in particular are grafted to hardwood rootstock like an oak so that the roots are strong and strudy while the plant itself takes on the characteristics of the desired fruit. Science.
European grapes don’t do well in the states, especially the south, because of the different weather, bugs and diseases here. But if you live in the south, than I know you’ve heard of muscadine grapes. It’s hardy and native to the area, making it the perfect rootstock for our delicate Tuscan grape vines. So, in early spring, we grafted our mixture of sangiovese cuttings to our muscadine plants. Finding enough muscadines was challenging in itself but we got it done and to our surprise, it was working! The new cuttings were budding. Everything seemed to be going great. According to plan, and 90% of the cuttings took. Now we just had to pray the weather held up.
Which it didn’t, we had two cold snaps in the Spring and unfortunately, our little budding grape cuttings didn’t make it. 🙁
Patience.
Putting us behind, it seemed like a set-back, but really it was the set-up for an even better comeback! It gave us some time to let our muscadine rootstocks grow and mature. A lot of them started putting out new muscadine shoots even after we cut them all off! They are some resilient plants! A characteristic that will make them better for grafting next year. On top of it all, we learned some things that will make us better grape farmers in the long run.
Budding graft in the greenhouse! 
Budding graft in the vineyard!
Not to mention that this little hiccup gave us the opportunity to try something new as well! Muscadines are pretty much the ugly duckling of wines. I have my conspiracy theories as to why but I’ll keep them to myself for now, lol. With that said, we figured, “hey, why can’t we try to use the muscadines to our advantage and make something different?” – so that’s what we are doing. Playing around with different muscadine recipes to see how we can utilize this native gem.
The orchard is doing so well. The fruit trees are thriving and in the midst of all the inconsistencies with the vineyard, it was steady and gave me that little boost to keep going.
For reference, we have 3 apple trees, 5 peach trees, 4 cherry trees, and 5 blueberry bushes
The first bud on one of the apple trees! 
Our first blueberries!
I have a vision of lush fruit trees canopying a sweet little firepit overlooking the property in its entirety. The firepit is in the works – hurry up Sam!
As usual, life throws you some curve balls so even though the orchard is trucking along it isn’t without its challenges. Where we live has and always will be a deer haven (bambi’s as we like to call them). I cannot remember a time when we didn’t see deer roaming around the farm – little fawns in tow – frolicking in the horse paddocks. Naturally, deer are grazers, which means…inevitably, they would eat my plants! (insert stressed emoji here). However, it’s not the end of the world. Bushes come back and plants recuperate – just how nature intended.
Patience
Lavender rows are in the works, they are slower than I expected but they are going strong like the little champions I know they will be. I cannot wait to create soaps, oils, and all sorts of lavender infused home and bath products!
Our glorious, but daunting, retention bank, is (going to be) a beauty but have we ever had to exercise patience with this part of the project! I always had the dream of living in the European countryside, which is why it is the theme of our entire 18 acre farm and home (in progress). Cascading wild flowers and pompas grass will line the bank and at the top a secret little walking path will be hidden by Italian Cypress trees. How do you get to the top of the bank you might ask? Well, by a whimsical railraod tie staircase, of course. And what might you find at the top of this staircase? The cutest little antique garden bench nestled underneath a tree. The perfect vantage point.
Perhaps one of the most enchanting areas of our property is the dried up river bed that runs through the middle of our farm, separating our vineyard from where our house will be. It was once a dense wall of trees but we have since removed the heavy brush, leaving all of the Dogwood and hardwood trees intact. We plan on using old telephone poles to create a bridge from one side to the other – hello Bridge to Terabithia vibes!
With ALL that said, those are big chunks of the vineyard that I think you all are most interested in! I hope you found this post helpful and informative. Follow along with OUR NEW INSTAGRAM PAGE! The Finnerty Farm Instagram page is offically live and we are already so thrilled by the amount of people who are following along!