Dropping Fruit to Improve Wine Quality

It may not look like it from the picture but we spent last Tues, Wed and Thursday dropping almost half of the fruit from our Chambourcin vines.  This picture shows one of the vines after we had removed 10 shoots to improve airflow around the grapes and then removed about 20 clusters of grapes.  We have never been in the situation where are grapes are setting this much fruit and the conditions for growth have been so perfect.  The abundant rainfall in June has produced an over abundance of foliage in plants that already had perfect pollination conditions.  The idea is to thin the fruit to improve the overall quality of our product.  We had to thin the clusters on our Cabernet Franc last year as those vines reached 4 years of age.  This year our Chambourcin and Vidal Blanc followed the same course of overproduction.  Thankfully our Chardonnay were thinned early when we first pulled shoots to improve the disease control so we will not have to cluster thin the Chardonnay.  Our next task will be to put up bird netting to protect the grapes which we have now thinned.  I will follow up with some pictures of our new bird netting later this week as we install the nets.