Ready for the New Year
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Rains over?
No! Not here in St. Helena. Rained like crazy yesterday afternoon, and it still is quite grim out there. Limited pruning going on out there.
I take that assessment of today back - the sun is out!
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In a normal year, 2/3 to 3/4 of the rain would be still to come. We’ve had some decent rain the past 24 hours, Tahoe area received some snow. Sierras still way behind (partly has been warm) but more is supposed to be coming.
-Al
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Very slow start, water wise. I’ve gone out to the vineyard in a couple rainy patches to work on the drainage but there’s nothing moving toward my pond from either surface or subsurface runoff. In a good year, the pond is filled by now.
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Some chance of frost over next few days, but I think most everything is dormant.
-Al
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Yikes!
That’s when snow is the prettiest, right after it falls (or while still falling).
-Al
I live in Florida. What is this thing you call “snow”?
Definitely not the same thing as the snow in Miami.
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Napa is so green right now. The hills are such a contrast to the dormant vines. We had a bit of rain recently with more on the way this week. Any warmer days and we’ll see the mustard pop soon.
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Walla Walla wine fans will want to sit down for this one… right now, at almost 10pm on Sat night, we’re hitting our high for the day at 5F. We saw a low of -9F this morning. Nobody knows exactly how bad the damage will be but there will be damage - and it might be very significant because of long is has stayed in the danger zone. We hit -11 at our vineyard according to a so-so weather station. We’ve hit that low before and been okay but it’s never stayed this cold for so long (~27 hours and counting) since we’ve lived here. My guess is that this weekend’s temps will be the defining story of the 2024 vintage here. Stay tuned.
I don’t see how your area will be able to avoid some SERIOUS winter kill with temps like that. Especially younger vines.
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Horrible news Tim.
Sorry to hear that news Tim. In our CT vineyard we hit -7F for 3-4hrs last Feb. That led to a significant loss of primary and secondary buds . An advective frost in late May then frosted young shoots in the southern half of our vineyard. Both events were super unusual for us and led to 10-20% yields across our white and red varieties. Hope you do better than we did.
A trip up and down Silverado Trail yesterday found a fair amount of pruning done. Seems every year there are fewer and fewer vineyards doing a first pass rather than just buttoning the vines down tight.
Merrill,
What’s the rationale for either option?
So sorry Tim. I hope it is not as bad as feared. Hang in there.
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When you do a first pass, you’re mostly pulling a tangle of canes out from the wires, and you can set your less skilled, or otherwise idle, workers on that job. The pruning wounds you make then are vulnerable to eutypa infection. There is more inoculum released by rains early in the Winter, and that diminishes later as more rains exhaust the bank of eutypa spores. When you make a second, final, pruning pass, you’ll be cutting off any parts of the canes that might have been infected earlier, with the first pass. You’ll also be moving much faster on the final pass when you’re not fighting brush out of the wires. This is applicable mostly to cordon pruned vines. With cane pruning, the first cuts you make, where you’re selecting the fruiting cane for the coming year, are the most important and require more judgement.
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