This Week in the Vineyard 3

Bring on the Zinc Oxide!

So I've been complaining about all the cool weather this year and this week it got up to 107 degrees! Tuesday and Wednesday both got over 104. Up here on the mountain on Wednesday it was already 90 at 8:00 in the morning. I was very happy to get some hot weather, it felt like summer had finally arrived (for three days anyway), but this heat resulted in severe sunburn in many vineyards. My vineyard has areas that just fried. You can see what happens to the fruit from the pictures, and in some cases, even the leaves get scorched. This fruit will most likely dry up and fall off or in some cases we will have to remove burnt clusters or individual burnt grapes. A few sunburned grapes are ok, there are always a few, but if there are too many it can give the wine an undesirable cooked flavor. A burnt berry will not fully ripen even if it doesn't desiccate. I am not going to remove all the burnt grapes right away because I don't want to expose the rest of the fruit to possible future heat waves. Usually the grapes can acclimate a bit and don't always get burned but this year has been so mild and it turned so hot very suddenly that the grapes were very sensitive. Also, in some cases vineyard managers leafed much more than normal (because of the abnormally cool season) and the grapes were therefore more exposed to the sun. We did this in our vineyard, but only on the morning side and it was the afternoon sun side that burned. My vineyard, and many others as well, will lose a significant amount of crop due to this sunburn. So the saga continues - a very difficult growing year indeed.

Aftermath of a Heat Wave