Walking with Jean-Marie in the Annadel Estate vineyard on Monday we saw a few splashes of color. Jean-Marie said dryly: “Well, I guess the grapes didn’t forget to do that after all.” I’d think he was being facetious if we weren’t looking ahead to yet another week where the forecast is for nighttime temperatures in the high 40s to low 50s and daytime highs struggling to get out of the 70s.
That’s the young-vine Pinot clone 777 above — the block is pretty uniformly colored to the extent seen in the picture, and is ahead of the rest of the vineyard. On the other hand, veraison in the young-vine Pinot clone 943 (below) is very spotty. 
Lagging the 943 Pinot is the clone 667 — I had to search to find the color in the next image outside the pocket of stressed vines in this block. 
I couldn’t find any color in the Pinot clone 115 or in any of the Rhône varieties, though there were a few colored berries in the very young HVS Pinot.
We still have not irrigated. And the canes are still growing in the mature vines, although the new vineyard has shut down. We will water the baby blocks next week, and the weak slope with the Tannat and Mourvedre. But we won’t water the established vines down-slope.
I have put off hedging the old vines as long as I could — now we have to in order to get tractors down the rows, even though with water still available to the vines it will mean more lateral growth. And we have to get the tractors down the rows in order to spray — we haven’t sulfured in a month and I’m nervous about mildew (have heard horror stories from some other growers). Ordinarily we would spray sulfur every 2 weeks or so, but even after a month I can still smell sulfur on my hands after working in the canopy. The daytime highs have not been hot enough for long enough to cook the sulfur into SO2, but the mildew pressure is high.
I think we are at least 3 weeks behind a “normal” growing season. My grower friends are discussing the cold weather and prospect for a late harvest with nervous anxiety. It will take about 1/4″ of rain to turn the mood to gallows humor.
