Handling the Heat

There's been a lot of talk Oregon’s recent record-setting heat wave. When I was first asked about how it would impact the vines, my honest answer was that we didn’t know. Now that a week has gone by and we’ve had a few chances to walk the vineyard, I can honestly say the vines seem to have shrugged it off.

You don’t have to be a viticulturist to see how green and healthy the leaves and clusters look in this photo:

I didn't look hard for this photo - I couldn't find any damage on the mature vines, on either the growing tips, leaves, or clusters.

I don’t know that we get too take much credit for this.  We do what we can to keep the vineyard healthy, but the vines are doing the real work. One small thing we did, to cut them some slack during the heat, was to wait until afterward to start hedging. Eventually the growing shoots outgrow the trellis, and the practice of cutting off the excess growth to control the canopy is called hedging. Waiting until things cooled down helped shade the rest of the vine during the heat.  Here you can see a before and after shot from hedging a few days ago, and you can probably see why we waited:

There was still one area of concern: the new grafts.  We grafted an acre of vines over to Chardonnay this spring, and those new shoots were much too small to shade themselves.  We were a little worried about how that area fared, but it looks like even those vines are tougher than we guessed.  Look closely at the young shoot on the new graft in this photo and you can see a few brown spots, but the shoot and graft are healthy:

The bottom line is that things are going to be okay. Nobody wants to see another heat wave, but this one passed without much damage. There are crops like cherries that were closer to harvest last week that were much more impacted, just as we would probably have had more damage if we were close to harvest. For us, though, this was another reminder that the vines understand their job, often better than we do.