Viticulture in Ireland: Rain!

Saturday 20 August 2022

Rain!

End poles are braced

The heatwave finally broke a couple of days ago and we had three partial days of rain. This morning it was coming down in buckets. You can feel the earth sigh with relief. With the earth a bit softer again, Alex was able to install the braces for the end poles and cement them in.

We lost two vines to the heat and drought, both Chardonnay. I will root cuttings from the five year old vines. It seems that just sticking them in the ground works just fine. Forget about rootstock. The other vines have suffered a bit -- a few shrivelled leaves here and there -- but overall not too bad. I'm just glad we didn't have the conditions they had on the continent. Horrible sudden storms, over 220 kph winds, destructive hail, and torrential rain tore from Spain across the Med and into Italy and Austria. The rest of the continent is suffering from drought and heat -- the Danube is down 5 feet, Lake Como is unrecognizable. Many crops were destroyed by either drought or storms. It is feeling apocalyptic.

Meanwhile, our grapes are now increasing in size and the Rondo continues to turn red. The Pinot Noir are still tiny and fuzzy, I'm not certain what that means. I hope it's not fungus, but the dry weather would indicate not. The Chardonnay have a few clusters, so we will mix whites this year. The Solaris are coming along but not in huge quantities as expected. All in all, it's pretty remarkable.

I told our story to a woman from Harvard named Sinéad O'Connor, who comes home to Ireland and writes for The Currency. She is writing about the vineyards in Ireland. She heard about us from Colm McCan who teaches about wine at the Ballymaloe cookery school and has a small vineyard in East Cork close to Cloyne. The word is getting out. I guess now we need to start making serious wine.