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.

Early Summer - Big Growth

We are about 10-14 days ahead of normal and the grapes are looking great. We spent the last few days clearing out the late canes and secondary buds that are just flowering now.

The grapes are looking good overall and most varieties have had good fruit set. The whites... l'acadie and Evangeline ...flowered later than the reds and just when we had a week of cooler and rainy days. 

That kind of weather is not the best for flowering and the clusters are not as well filled but still they are pretty good overall.

Vines are healthy the new vines planted this spring are doing good and the vines from last year are doing great. 

Good start to the season so far. 

The Baby Vines are Getting Big

We propegate our own vines from the existing vines in the vineyard. It takes a bit longer than ordering vines in from suppliers but kinda nice to know that all the vines come from the same plants. We also got stiffed by a supplier that went out of business after we provided our payment..which set us back a year. We blogged about the propegation a few years ago. See the links below...

I am Groot - growing baby grape vines

Baby vines ready to plant

There is another reason as well. The vines we grow have this amazing 12-18 inch root system that means they dont need much watering off the start compared to ones purchased that may have 6 inche roots.

This next section that we are filling in is a 2 acre piece and we have a small section left to plant. What you see here are more of the Marechal Foch vines starting thier 2nd year with the old vineyard in the distance. 

Weve got great soil here but its light and prone to erosion so we seed the white clover between every second row ...it is starting to take hold as well. This will help build and maintain the soil and chokes out other weeds. We rotate to the opposite rows after 3-4 years.

Winter - Spring - Summer in a Month

Never seen a start to the year like this one. Mid April we still had snow on the ground. Come May 1st we were about 7-10 days behind and the buds were barely hitting scale crack on some varieties. Come May 21, we were a week ahead and bud break occured in the 2 week period from May 1 to may 15.

Come June 10th we are in full bloom, about 2.5 weeks ahead of normal and the earliest bloom we've ever had. Previously, the earliest bloom was June 15/16 and iflook back to last year we were 8-10 days late in bloom which occured around July 8/9.

Here is the snow on April 10

And here is the grapes flowering June 10 , L'Acadie and Foch (bottom)

December Deep Freeze

 Yikes! Just what we were hoping wouldnt happen - an intense deep freeze and early in the winter season yet. Thats not good.

Mid December hit the Okanagan and our area with terrible cold..the kind that will set you back a season or two. Yes there was some intense cold with lows in the -30c range experienced from Kamloops to Salmon arm and Vernon to Kelowna. 

That kind of cold will kill the buds and trunks even on some of the varieties grown in those parts..like merlot..gamay..pinot noir etc. Whats worse is that the cold hit so early in the winter that the vines were not as yet climatized to full winter hardiness and even the likes of -20c can cause significant bud damage. Unfortunately, alot of vineyards as far south as Summerland and Penticton that have likely had some damage.

While we didnt get the cold that some places did we still hit -26c which is the coldest temp wevecever had. Our previous coldest temperature was -24.5c. Now most of our varieties have cold hardiness to about -30c at max..but they will probably have some damage as this cold spell happened so early in the winter before they would have reached there max cold hardiness.

We see that Nakusp to the north of us hit -22.5c and this is the coldest they have recorded since 1968. 

We also had drought stressed vines so we may have more damage than if the vines were stronger going into winter.

The winter is not close to being over yet but hoping thats the real cold part has gone by.

Snow on the Vines

 Amazing time of the year as we head into winter. There was really no snow to speak of at the vineyard up until  few weeks ago then it came and stuck. 

When it snows here the snow comes straight down and piles up even on trellis wires and vine canes. 

One of the most amazing things is listening to it fall...it is so quiet here that you can actually hear it hit the ground or trees or vines. And makes for quite the beautiful landscape.

We are checking on the health of the vines. It a bit early to do so but the drought last summer hit some vines hard and we are curious about the health and winter hardiness of the vines.

The drought conditions leave the vines less winter hardy than normal so we are hoping there is no significant cold snaps this winter.

Drought 2022 New Data

So now that the season is over and we are into late fall there is some data that has come out that plots the 2022 drought across Canada. So to be clear there was drought in some areas of Canada and not in others and really year over year this is the case. So places get rain or more rain than usual and other places get less rain than usual or in our case - No rain for over 4 monthes.

The Manitoba Cooperators agricultural news paper published an excellent map that shows the areas and severity of drought across Canada. In our last blog we discussed the harvest and about the drought and the impact the drought had on some of the grapes this year.

For the most part the grape varieties did ok but some vines really suffered and that impacted the quality of grape and even disrupted the ripening. As always when we have an unuasual event we learn and adjust and while we will adjust pruning on some varieties, we now know that Arrow Lakes Vineyard is parked on some remarkably deep and moisture retentive soil.

https://www.manitobacooperator.ca/daily/drought-expands-across-western-prairies/

The map here shows the drought areas in Canada for the 2022 season and the red areas on the map are zones of extreme drought. Arrow Lakes Vineyard is located in the largest red area in the south west quadrant of British Columbia. We have added a expanded view section, with a yellow star, to show where we placed on the drough map.

Remarkably, no rain and beyond tinder dry but hardly any forest fires in our area this year - bit of a silver lining but for the most part its the passing rainstorms and lightning that are responsible for the majority of forest fires. So goes to say, no rain, no storms, no fires.

Harvest 2022 and the Big Drought

 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!