90% at the School of Hard Knocks

We had our first budbreak this year around the middle of May, and knew from our friend, Dave, the vineyard manager for Saltwater Farm that mid-May is typical for vine wakeup around here. We were very excited! We noticed that most of the plants that were pushing were located in the south portion of our vineyard which is rectangular in shape and runs north-south. We rationalized that the south portion of the field was getting sun exposure earlier than the north which seemed to be more in shade, so we waited for more vines to push. We have to admit that the waiting game is now over and around 90% of our vines are still "dormant". While some of our vines that pushed in May are very healthy looking, most of our vines are sad looking sticks.
We spoked to our vineyard consultant, Fritz, who was kind enough to give us a quick call after we emailed him and he spoke with us at length. There are many mitigating factors as to why this might have happened and we went over them:

• When our vines arrived in May, 2013, they were etiolated, meaning that they had sent out their primary bud in the darkness and during planting those first shoots fell off, so our growth was from the secondary buds
• We experienced a heat wave in the summer of 2013 with July being extremely hot and humid and we had no way to give the young vines the water they needed
• The vines began to be infected with black rot and we did not spray a fungicide
• We saw an influx of Japanese beetles that began in late June, feasting on the grape leaves that lasted until September and we choose to use soapy water to pick them off the vines
• Concurrent with the beetle invasion was the occurrence of powdery and downy mildew, again, we choose not to spray the vineyard
• In January, 2014 we were hit with a polar vortex that brought unusually cold temperatures to our region

Those are only some of the reasons that we could invoke to try to understand why 90% of our vineyard did not make it through the winter. I have to take the major responsibility for the lack of vitality in our vineyard because I really wanted to grow our plants organically, that is without any use of chemicals whatsoever and my husband, reluctantly went along with my plan. When the Japanese beetles came, we went out into the field with soapy water and picked them off the vines. The result was the 90+ attrition in our vineyard. We are overachievers at the School of Hard Knocks.

In our region, it is possible to grow grapevines without herbicides, pesticides (some would disagree), nematocides, etc, but fungicides are an absolute necessity given our climate. This year, with guidance from Fritz, we have been using fungicides to control the powdery and downy mildews as well as black rot and our plants that have survived are in very good shape. We are still seeing late budbreak so we don't really know the true extent of the devastation. Yesterday, during our lunch break, we went to pick up Chinese take out and our fortune cookie contained the following message: