Sum of the Elements
The Elements of 2010
A false start to the season led to an early bud break on April 5th and the newly awakened shoots struggled to push new leaves for three weeks thereafter. May also was on the cool side and June was the wettest ever on record in the Willamette Valley. Once the rain mercifully stopped and temperatures warmed up, the stunted vines grew vigorously from the nutrient charged wet soils. Subsequently, a lot of effort went into managing the canopy. Also, less cultivating of competing vegetation helped take up excess soil moisture and an extra hedging helped keep the canopy in balance.
Bloom held off until the end of June, when the weather dried out a bit and fruit set was observed July 15th. Despite lagging behind two weeks, the fruit set well giving us very small clusters as it did in 2008, but looser. Due to the slow developing crop, we felt it necessary to thin early and drop more fruit than typical for a target of just 1.5 tons per acre.
The weather conditions remained dry and sunny as they usually do for the rest of the summer. Heat units remained low, however, and it was obvious we’d have a very late harvest. To help speed up ripening, we completely removed the leaves from the fruiting zone after veraison. This greatly helped the fruit absorb the sun’s heat and aided in ripening as well as improving air flow, which kept the fruit in good condition.
One late season challenge that came from above wasn’t the weather at all. Like a scene from Hitchcock’s famous movie, "The Birds," our vineyard was "horrifically" attacked, not by crows out for blood, but by migrating starlings and robins looking for some carbs. The cool season had reduced farm crop levels and even wild berries across the entire northwest region. Consequently, there was much less fruit for migrating birds to feed on and they arrived in the valley sooner than expected feeding heavily on our pinot and others. Literally a ton of our fruit flew away, but it would have been a much bigger loss had we not fought so hard to keep the avian grape thieves moving.
The final days of our grape growing season came to an end in late October. The birds were persisting, light rain was adding to our anxiety, and the weatherman was promising buckets of rain on the horizon. A season of delays and sacrifice managed to gently and slowly ripen the pinot noir of PSV giving us concentrated fresh fruit flavors and a bright backbone of acidity. Well worth the wait! Our latest harvest yet, we picked October 17th, 18th and the 21st. The average yield was just 1.25 tons to the acre!
