Grapes are Late

We are cold at the experimental vineyard so far this year, and cold means late. The cold also had a terrible impact on the developing buds in late May. In an earlier blog I wrote about the -2 to -3 temperature we had in late May. Well that pretty much killed off the emerging buds and now only a few primary buids made it the rest are secondary buds on both the Ravat 34 and the Leon Millot. Good news is that some of the secondary buds produced clusters. You can see in the picture of Ravat 34 below, the dark reminant of the primary bud and the shoot from the secondary bud with a small cluster on it.

Here is a picture of one of a few shoots where the primary bud made it. Two clusters, Nice flowers.

The earliest Ravat clusters are just flowering so this is about 10 days late. Given a 90 day maturity for these grapes, at best, harvest would be about September 31st/October 1st.

The growth on the Ravat and Leon Millot is good (Ravat more even than the LM) and a few of the vines have already reached the 5 foot fruit wire.

As for the other varieties in the trial, the Agria is doing well with 17 of 18 plants comming back. The 5 ortega vines are growing but again very poor vigour. The Petite Millot looks very good, strong and healthy on all six plants, even budding out from last years cane, pretty much the same for the Cabernet Foch but not as vigorous. The Cabernet Libre had only 4 of 6 plants survive. The Regent had only 5 of 14 plants survive and 5 of 10 of the Pinot Noir survived. Now this is what is visible as of July 1st/2nd and some of the vines showed emerging shoots that were only a week or so old so it is possible that the others that appear lifeless may yet be alive and send up a shoot or two.