August 20 - Big Rain and Way Ahead

 So we are about 7-10 days ahead of normal this year with most of the grapes fully turned and accumulating sugars. 

The Evangeline is furthest ahead as usual and most are quite sweet already. Our 1 vine of Siegerrebe and the grapes on that one are about the same level of ripeness and bith of these are very early varieties. We can pick these in early September this year.

Our Marechal Joffre, Colmar Precose Noir and Lucy Kulhman are all fully turned, dark and getting sweet. Next in the ripeness parade is Leon Millot and Castel followed by the Marechal Foch.

We are all netted up but the birds had already been enjoying the buffet up until now.

We have lucked out with the rain..getting and inch or so around August 9th and then 2.5 inches around August 20/21st. The recent big rains resulted in a bit of splitting on some L'Acadie.

Interesting is the fungal pressure this year. More than any other years and the Evangeline getting hit the hardest of them all but overall the vines are doing good in this respect.

Photos below...Leon Millot followed by Foch and L'Acadie showing some splitting from the rains.

August 9 2023

So as of August 9th the grapes are looking good..and just got about 1 inch of rain the past few days..just in time too as the vines were getting a bit stressed.

The first evidence of veraison was about August 1 and reds started. The evangeline are softening and  sweetening up and good colour development on all the reds. We are about 7-10 days early.

Evangeline

Foch

Leon Millot 

L'acadie Blanc

Early is the Word, July 19

 So here we are July 19th and we are approaching bunch closure on the Foch. This is our benchmark as all of the other varieties are earliers if not a few days then a week. Nice clusters and we can expect some colour on them in the next week or so which will put us very early for veraison.

This goes hand in hand with the extremely earlier bud break and flowering, not to mention big heat in July so far. The down side is there ahas been no reain and no rain in the long range forcast. We'll be getting some water to the vines shortly so the vines don't move into a streesed position, but overall things are looking good.