I’ve gone on and on here about how this was such a tough vintage. I saw some really awful vineyard problems (luckily, few in our vineyard), heard some unprecedented horror stories from growers and winemakers, and tasted some pretty sketchy wines (thankfully, none of them in our winery). When the 2010 Grape Crush Report comes [...]
Archive for the ‘Weather’ Category
Harvest 2010: Not Done Yet
It is November 3rd and I still have Mourvedre, Grenache and Counoise on the vine at our Annadel Estate Vineyard. This is now officially the latest harvest I have done in 24 years. The Mourvedre is as ready as it is going to get — the seeds are ripe enough and flavors are good with [...]
Harvest 2010: Calamitous
Calamitous. There’s just no better word to describe this growing season. A cold spring and summer gave us budbreak, flowering and veraison later than I can ever recall. Some growers struggled with nearly the worst mildew pressure they have had to deal with — fortunately we were spared this at our Annadel Estate. We have [...]
Harvest 2010: A Quick Update
Just time for a quick update before I run off to the winery to clean up the press and crush the fruit we picked yesterday. This is a radar snapshot of the storm that is on top of us. We have had over 3″ of rain in the last 24 hours and more is expected. [...]
2010 Harvest: Pinot In The Barn
As I stepped out of the shower yesterday morning I heard rain on the skylight. Pretty heavy rain — nearly the last thing a winemaker wants to hear on the first day of harvest. Fortunately it was brief. By the time I got to the vineyard to see how the crews were doing on picking [...]
2010 Harvest: Finally, Pinot
Sunday, we’re bringing in all the Pinot from our Annadel Estate Vineyard. The past four days we have seen temperatures at the vineyard in excess of 95°F, with near 105°F for two of them. In some ways this was as hard on the vines as the blast furnace of 115+°F we saw back at the [...]
Sunburn Disaster
We had a heat spike last week. Monday it was over 90°F, Tuesday it nearly reached 110° and Wednesday it got to almost 105°. We haven’t cracked 80° since then, but the damage was done. I was hanging out with some winegrowing friends on Friday when I got a call from Jean-Marie: he was seeing [...]
The Joy That Is Grape Farming
No pictures today — I can barely get myself interested in another set of shots of grapes only part way through veraison; dear readers must be bored to tears. Jean-Marie and I met at the Annadel Estate vineyard today to assess crop loads and make a plan to get us to harvest. The good news [...]
Bloom Done, Berries Sizing
Early this week we had our first temperatures of the year in the 90s — three days in a row. Yesterday I went out to check on the young vine Pinot, to see how the vines were dealing with the heat and how the crew had performed with training them. Minimal signs of water stress, [...]
Bloom Barely Starting
I spent yesterday morning taking a long walk in the Estate vineyard. Didn’t have to go far to find a few flowers — a very few — in the young-vine Pinot. Nothing yet in the older Pinot or any of the Rhône varieties.
