2007...a bit of a rollercoaster so far!

Here's a few pictures I took of the grapes last week.   We had a pretty good fruit set this year, meaning that once the vines flowered, they then made grapes that actually stayed on the vines and didn't fall off.  The funny thing is that flowering was very uneven, on certain vines some of the clusters were in full flower when others hadn't even opened, and you can see the result in this picture.  See how much of a difference in the size of the grapes there is? (above)

We did, as always have some problems with fruit set, you can see in these pictures the little black spots where the baby grapes did not hang on they just shriveled up and turned black, and others where they really didn't set and the whole stem shriveled up. These are just some examples of the bad things that happen, but all in all there's some really nice fruit out there.  Harvest may be a bit tricky in terms of picking the ripest grapes, we may have to go through twice.  Since we have such a great picking team though, I think we'll sort it out.

As far as the weather, we've been extremely lucky getting some good soaking rains every 2-3 weeks throughout the month of May and even a good storm last week.  The lightening and thunder were pretty amazing at 4 o'clock in the morning.  It rained so hard that we had to get the pump out to keep the water from coming in our back door.  It would be good if the rain stopped now though, we're not used to all of this humidity here.  Last weekend we sprayed our fourth dose of sulfur this year, and our second of copper, which is the total number of treatments we did the whole year last year!  So, needless to say this is a very different year.  I feel lucky though when I consider the poor vignerons in Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and other regions, they have been getting incredible quantities of rain and had hail, strong winds and everything else you can think of.  It is very good to be in the sunny south right now...

Comments

[William Patton]

Yes this year seems to be a very unsettled one. We had 50mm of rain in about 2 hours in our part of Kent on Tuesday night. Yesterday and today were beautiful. My baby vines (only a few experimental ones) seem to be thriving on it, however. One thing you can always say about viticulture and, I suppose any other form of agriculture, is : expect the unexpected. Hope the weather settles down after the summer solstice and you can cut down on the spraying.