Annual Cycle of Growth

It's time to update the annual cycle of growth chart. This season has been a rather unusual one for us due to the hard frost that we had in February that did not look very promising for us when we did a bud count. Nevertheless, we did the spring pruning and when early May came around, we had just finished laying down this vintage's fruiting canes and were seeing budbreak when....May 18, an unusually cold weather event hit our vineyard and took out most of the growing shoots in the south end of the vineyard. The further along the shoots were in the growing cycle, the more they were affected by this unusual frost event.

We were busy taking out the damaged shoots which occupied us for the rest of May and into early June, when we noticed that the Chardonnay was in bloom. Typically, we take care to document bloom in all of our varieties but due to the circumstances that we were in, we neglected our duties! However, it still is a good idea to fill in the Annual Cycle of Growth chart with additional information, so here is our Vintage 2023 information so far.

We are still waiting for veraison in our varieties and looking at the information in the Annual Cycle of Growth, veraison in the Auxerrois and Chardonnay might be on the late side. Time to bring our hand held refractometer to the vineyard to check the sugar content of our grapes!