It is truely an amazing thing growing grapes year to year and watching the subtle and not so subtle differences in grape quality as a function of mother natures influences.
And there it is, mother natures influences pretty much everything and this year was yet another remarkable year that was like no other in the 15 years weve been growing. 2022 started with the coolest May we ever recorded and a cool June as well with an extreme delay in flowering extending into the second week of July!!
Our season usually ends with a frost in the first 7 days or so of October and with that in mind it was hard to imaging that anything but the earliest varieties would ripen. So we were counting on the L'Acadie Blanc and the Evangeline to come through as well as the Leon millot, but Marechal Foch would be a challenge at best as that leaves only about 85 days to get to a low level of ripeness.
Here is L'Acadie at harvest
Given those parameters we cut back both canes and fruit early in the season to give the grapes a fighting chance to ripen. And for the most part they turned out ok. What we did not expect was the really good heat in the rest of July, August, September and October - but what we also had was drought - worst drought in 15 years and to this day we have not had rain at the vineyard since July 6th, so we are nearly 4 monthes without rain. Here is the other thing...we havent had a frost yet as of November 1st!! Crazy year to say the least.
Despite our best efforts to reduce crop load of both canes and fruit we noticed the Marechal Foch was not ripening as fast as the Leon Milot..in side by side rows with the same crop load. Marechal Foch seemed to be less able to withstand the droughty conditions and by late September we noticed there was a 3 point gap between the Leon millot Brix and marechal Foch brix accumulation. - the Foch vines were shutting down. As a result they were not going to reach an acceptable sugar content and tapped out at approximately 17 brix with a 15 to 19 brix spectrum depending on the location of vines in the vineyard.
So we will adapt our pruning and bud counts for future years, leaning for fewer canes but retaining more clusters that can be trimmed back if similar condition prevail.
In the end, the L'Acadie and Evangeline were harvested October 2 and were at 18 and 19 brix respectively..pretty good all in all. We harvested the limited amounts of Leon Millo on October 10th at about 19 brix also, which was good...and yet we could have left those another week.
Some highlights were the new side netting and equipment worked excellent, the white grapes are comming on strong and the newly planted vines came through the drought ok as well. Already looking forward to next season!
