Hello and
Welcome,
This
is the Amalie Robert Estate Climate Update for July 2017.
Farming
wine berries during July in the Willamette
Valley
What
it means is putting up three sets of wires by hand (if you can find any hands)
and clipping them into place, hedging and mowing, and hedging again and again.
You have to make progress every day just to keep up to where you were
yesterday. The humans get tired, the tractors need maintenance, but the vines
are relentless. Please read thorough the May FLOG to see how 38.5 miles of vines turns into 231
miles of wires to implement our “Canopy Management” strategy.
Then,
you wake up one morning and it’s August. Look in the mirror, and well, somebody
needs a shave and a haircut. Waft The Fruit!
The
good news is we have not had to deal with the insane heat of the last three
summers, yet. But one look at the weather map and it is pretty farming obvious
that we are about to get Red Farming Hot!
So
you may ask yourself, or Ernie - the farming farmer who farms our farm, why go
through all of this detailed shoot positioning and hedging and canopy
management. The answer is hang time to develop aroma and flavor. If you take
care of the canopy and open it up so there is good airflow and moderate sun
exposure, those awful-bad-nasty mildew and Botrytis spores will not be able to
rot your pristine Pinot Noir clusters, or any other estate grown clusters we
happen to be farming.
Because
even though it looks nice now, it is going to rain. Always has, always will.
And it is going to rain before harvest. And as much as dry farmed vineyards
love rain, that very same rain is the enabler of rot. But if you have taken
care of your canopy, you can take some rain with confidence that your clusters
will come through it uncompromised.
That
allows us to wait and harvest when we want to based on aroma and flavor, as
opposed to having to harvest because the fruit is starting to rot. In that
situation, the fruit is not great, but with each passing day it just gets
worse.
Then
there was 2013 when Typhoon Pabuk dumped 9 inches of rain on us just before
harvest in the short period of 4 days. No matter, we made a Trockenbeerenauslese
style Chardonnay and named it – Pabuk’s Gift. Yeah, bring it on.
So,
that was July. August is going to bring the heat. That is when we will start
our thinning program. A snip here a clip there, we remove the wings and the
other bits and pieces we don’t need. You can think of it as a “Mani Pedi” for
the vines. Once the crop is set, there is really not too much more to do - except
wait and worry. Ah, the gestalt of farming.
So
let’s have a look at the numbers and then we can compare and contrast or just
pontificate ad nauseam the 2017 vintage compared to prior years. If you are in
need of some back vintages to complete your analysis, you can
E-mail Dena to see what she has tucked away in the library.
Right.
So on and so forth we go. The month of July recorded 529.9 degree days with a
high temperature of 94.6 degrees and a low temperature of 46.2 degrees. This
brings the 2017 vintage to date accumulation up to 1,094.4 degree days. There
was no measurable precipitation.
You
may notice some other vintages that are clustered about the 1,100 degree day
mark at the end of July including 2005 (Suite!), 2007 (Hey!), 2009 (Who knew?),
and 2012 (Close enough.)
However,
as foretold by the weather map, August is bringing the heat. Or as the saying
goes, Hell is coming to breakfast. We’ll have the kettle on.
Kindest Regards,
Dena & Ernie
