Hello and Welcome,
Flowers in Pommard Clone Pinot Noir.
It seems everyone is back to work after the long weekend, including the vines.
It’s not like you are going to tell 20 year old Pommard vines when to flower,
especially those grafted onto 5C. But in the course of putting up our first set
of trellis wires, they have decided now is their time. On June 1st
we spied our first Pinot Noir flowers, and it was 103 degrees. We chose to
commemorate the event with a glass of Pinot in Pink Rosé!
The Harvest Window Appears
Over the past 30 years or so, Pinot Noir wine berries in the Willamette Valley
have usually achieved full aroma and flavor development 105 days AFTER
flowering. So, we can now pencil in a harvest window, and that is a handy thing
to have as we move through the growing season.
From the vine’s point of view, they are simply trying to ripen their seeds and
attract some creature to deposit them hither and yon so they can reproduce.
Kinda makes you feel bad for seedless grapes.
We just want to make wine. If you are into the Julian calendar, as we are, you
can take June 1st (Day 152) and add 105 growing season days to get
Day 257. And that day is the first potential day of harvest, September
14th. You can check our Julian Calendar
math here.
Stages of wine berry flowering.
But first we must have pollination. Flowers are nice, but we are not going to
have any clusters to pluck if there is no pollination. Good news is that the
weather is supposed to be nice and wine berries are self-pollinating – they do
not depend on bees as most other crops do for pollination.
After a couple weeks of pollination, we can check out the fruit set. The
flowers that do not pollinate are called shatter and they fall off the stem.
What is left are tiny green wine berries. Quantitatively speaking, if there are
“a lot” of them, then the “fruit set” was good. If there are only a few, then
you have a “poor set”.
The quality of fruit set gives you an idea of how many tons of wine berries you
have on the vine. Watching the temperature over the next 45 days gives you an
idea of how hot the growing season may be. If you are paying attention,
somewhere in there is a plan to thin the potential crop load to match the
growing season.
Flowers in Dijon Clone Chardonnay.
Vintage 2021 reminds us of vintage 2009 where we harvested early because the
vines flowered early. And thus denied the birds their opportunity to freely
feast upon our wine berries. It was a wonderful thing. However, in 2011 we
flowered in July, and harvest was not scheduled until late October. The birds
were back early that year with a vengeance (and friends and relations) when
several TONS of wine berries took flight.
That’s what’s in store for us. Along with everything else Mother Nature and the
farming endeavor can send our way. What are you going to be doing in 105 days?
Kindest Regards,
Dena & Ernie
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