Vintage 2021: August Aftermath of Hurricane Henri

We were just saying good bye to our family who were visiting us from the West Coast on Thursday, August 19 and waiting for the rains from tropical storm Fred to passby when another Atlantic storm, Henri came up on our radar. By Friday, we were getting notifications that Henri could make a direct hit on southern New England but the models were really ambiguous as to where Henri would make landfall.
On Saturday, we had some friends come very early in the morning to help us secure the netting on the Auxerrois. Other than that, there was nothing else we could do in the vineyard to protect our ripening grapes.
We did have a bit more work to do because before 2019, all of the wines that we made were being stored in our basement. Lucky for us, we just rented space in an industrial park so all of Friday afternoon, we were moving our wine from the basement to the rental space. We had been planning to do that anyway, so there is nothing like an impending hurricane to expedite the move.
By the time Saturday evening rolled around, the newscast was full of warnings of 3-5 foot wave surges, coupled with a full moon and high tide, all of which sounded very ominous. The weather models now were showing that landfall could be in New Haven, CT or somewhere in eastern CT.
Our home is very close to the Atlantic Ocean so our friend reached out to us and offered her home for us to stay at. We took her up on her offer and spent Sunday morning to early afternoon at her place until at 1:30 the sun came out and we dared to see what was happening. We had power in our home and felt that we dodged a big storm. What happened was that Henri made landfall in the town due east of us in Westerly, Rhode Island, so all of the winds were on the east side of the hurricane and all of the rains were on the west side of the hurricane, where we were.

We didn't get a chance to go to the vineyard until yesterday and we were very relieved that our vines were fine:

As we made our inspection we found that the red varieties are slowly entering veraison:

There are many things to do in this upcoming week which will once again bring temperatures in the 90s with high dewpoints. Translation: it will be hot and humid, these are the dog days of summer.