Vintage 2024: January Notes

It's time to begin paying close attention to the weather for Vintage 2024. So far, we have had a mild January with temperatures in the high 30's if not the 40's. But, we have been having a lot of rain. The first rain/snow event was on January 6-7. We came away from this weather event with nothing more than a coating of ice which melted during the day.
Then, a more serious rainfall from January 9-10 with winds gusting to 50 mph was in the forecast. Once again, we survived with just rain and no power outages, despite the forecasters calling for serious gusty winds. We seem to be doing the deja thing with rain yesterday evening into Saturday morning with wind gusts to 66 mph.
Since we have been busy labeling and waxing our 2019 vintage, we weren't able to go to the vineyard. Yesterday, our hunter sent us the following pictures. A maple tree on the east side of the vineyard fell, just narrowly missing doing damage to the trellising. Our hunter said that he would cut the tree into firewood. Thank you, Rich!

Looking ahead, the temperatures appear to be slowly falling which is a good thing for winter acclimation for the grapevines.