Pinot Noir achieves ripeness!

 

Although two gales in one week stripped the vineyard bare and desiccated the leaves on nearby trees, a few grapes survived long enough to test for sugar content. The Brix of the remaining grapes came in at 17 to 19.5. They tasted sweet and complex. I'd say there is hope for future harvests. 

Gale yesterday

 

It blew, it rained, and it blew some more all day yesterday while Craig worked his butt off digging last year's donkey poo and straw out of the shed and spreading it on the vineyard floor. I hope it's decomposed enough to not be toxic. If it's okay, it should start to correct some of the soil deficiencies. I'll have to order minerals to supplement. The max wind speed recorded at Mayo Sailing Club was 78 knots. 

The winds decimated the leaves on the vines so it appears the Pinot Noir will not have enough support to ripen sufficiently. The brix reading is 12, not high enough. But I am encouraged enough to believe that accelerating warming will one day get us over the line. It is also probably too late to collect leaves to send to Teagasc for disease analysis, but I will pursue this next week. 

Nino 3.4 SSTs off the charts

 

For the first time in recorded history, the Niño 3.4 sea-surface temperature (SST) is above 30.0°C, reaching a preliminary SST of 30.06°C on October 5th. The Niño 3.4 SST anomaly is now 3.41°C above the 1991-2020 baseline.

This afternoon, we were basking in 18C temps and sunshine, perfect for bringing in all the vulnerable plants. 

I had a busy day. GP visit first thing, breakfast in This Must be the Place (recommended), painted window at 22 on the Quay, food shopping at Tesco, lunch at home, plants moved into polytunntel, and catch up online. Just a normal day in retirement. 

September second warmest on record

September was provisionally the second-warmest September on record. The average temperature of 15.22°C ranks it behind only 2021’s average of 15.27°C. Significantly higher than average temperatures across the country made it 1.62°C warmer than the 1991-2020 average and 2.29°C above the average for 1961-1990. It was generally dull, wet and warm overall. We had only 42 degree days below 15.5C compared with more than 75 for the past two years and 53 over the LTA.  Soil temperature was higher than expected, but the radiation was lower. 

So far, October is following suit. 

Seaweed fertiliser

 

This week's storm, which hit during a spring tide, dumped loads of seaweed on our driveway and along the road. So for the last few days, Alex has been collecting it and distributing it throughout the vineyard. A friend adamantly said we had to wash it, but I told her the torrential rainstorm already did that for us. This thing about washing the salt off the seaweed is BS. The salt spray in the wind already distributes a saline solution over our entire peninsula. 

Meanwhile, the Pinot Noir is coming along nicely.  Very pretty bunches, and they don't seem to be bothered by mildew. The warm weather has helped. Today was glorious. Sunny and warm, the weather station at MSC recorded a high temperature of 18.7C -- on the 3rd of October! And we've got three more days of warm weather to go. 

Yesterday morning

Yesterday Midday

Yesterday evening

Storm warning

 

The sky at 7:15 this morning was on fire. Red sky at morning, sailors' warning. And so here we are. It's blowin' hard, but from the ESE, a direction from which we have some protection. It's a big storm. 

Alex lit the solid fuel stove for the first time since last Spring because it got quite cold this morning, but now it feels like about 20 C degrees. Still, the warmth feels nice. We'll light a fire tonight for the first time, too. 

The pressure dropped in the course of the day from 1012 to 986 hPa.  We had a gust over 50 knots; that's 98 km/h. We haven't had storms all summer. We're not getting much rain, but the south is getting pummeled again. 

It was the hottest summer on record.  There have been no hurricanes in the Atlantic, but the Pacific is very active, with Cat5 Hurricane Polo making landfall at Baja California. We are about to see one of the largest rain events that’s ever been triggered in the continental United States by a Pacific Hurricane. The saturated remnants of former Category 5 Hurricane Polo are going to inject a massive conveyor belt of deep, tropical moisture up through NW Mexico and into the U.S. South-Central Texas could be at the epicentre of the event, with isolated rain totals potentially reaching up to a FOOT this week.

Met Éireann Summer Stats

Rondo Harvest and Pinot Noir Veraison

Today we harvested the Rondo. We have very little yield. The young plants had lovely bunches that seemed unaffected by Downy Mildew. However, any that were not bagged were eaten. Hares, foxes, and pine martens would have found them very tasty. Some that were eaten had bags lying on the ground next to them. Those cheeky buggers may have removed the bags to get at the tasty morsels. There weren't many, but they were lovely. 

The Rondo from the older vines were severely affected by the mildew, so our take was barely one bushel. Curiously, the old Rondo grapes taste very different from the new Rondo grapes. It broke my heart to see how many we lost. The berries that did survive are bigger than any we've had to date. We destemmed and crushed and got about 4 litres of must. Very little. It measured Brix 20 and so had enough sugar to get to a high enough ABV. 

We added the Brown yeast with nutrient and enzymes. Then Alex had a bright idea. We had 11 bottles   (750 ml) of wine from a few years ago (2021?  we didn't label it 😳😬) that is relatively undrinkable as it is too sweet. We tasted it, and it was highly reminiscent of port -- not bad, just sweet. He suggested we add those bottles to this year's must to increase the volume and ferment together. The wine tested at a Brix of 14. It was from a year that we added a sugar solution because we had very little must. I have a feeling it was the same year we thought the grapes had dried into raisins with the drought. But now we know it wasn't drought. It was mildew. So it was a similar year to this one. Alex measured the alcohol content; it's a respectable 12.4%.

As the situation couldn't be much worse than it already was, if we had had a stuck fermentation back then, we could restart it with this batch. Let's see what happens. 

And then we noticed another major development in the vineyard. Veraison has started in the Pinot Noir. 😀 We did not notice it yesterday, and we had both looked for it. 

Of course, in cool climates, Pinot Noir often requires 55 to 65 days for proper flavour development for still wine. Grapes are picked much earlier for sparkling wines, typically 42 to 50 days after veraison at a lower sugar level (18 to 20 Brix). If the weather continues as it has been, we could make it to harvest. I'll have to start spraying and keep my fingers crossed. 

A new rapid attribution study published today shows that increased temperatures and evaporation levels directly linked to climate change will make for drier farming and land conditions in Ireland.