Brix

One of the vineyard owners posted a note that he was just getting ready to harvest Solaris when the birds took half his crop. That spurred me into starting to measure the Brix of our grapes. We are not close to harvest yet. 

The Solaris came in at 15-16 while the Rondo were more varied. I measured from 12 to 16. The Pinot Noir aren't changing colour yet, so I didn't bother measuring them. 

Yesterday we had some extraordinary weather, including 5.5 mm of rain. The temperature was quite nice, and a gentle breeze blew without gusting. One extraordinary thing that I noticed was that our soil temperature was the warmest in the country at 17.8 C. The next warmest was 17.5 C in Belmullet. Dublin Airport was 16.0 C. That's quite a difference. I'll have to start watching that as it could have a bearing on our vineyard success. I know we have an unusual microclimate due to Clare Island's parting of the clouds. We can watch them flowing down both shores of Clew Bay while we have sunshine down the middle. We've observed the clouds meeting up and reconnecting again in Castlebar. 

Station              Rain Max   Min   Sun     Wind     Gust        Soil   Global Gmin

                                mm     oC  oC     hr     Kts (Km/h) Kts (Km/h) oC J/cm^2 oC

Newport Furnace 5.5    17.3         14.6            8.6 (16)          (0) 17.8      569 14.5

August Stats

The numbers are in for the month of August, and the stats for Newport Furnace are not nearly as dire with respect to rainfall as I expected. I still cannot see the data on my PC, but I can access it on my mobile. I cannot, however, copy and paste it here. 

Rainfall totalled 111.5 mm, which is not as far off from the 133.0 LTA. Mean temperature was 15.9C, right on the LTA of 15.5. Soil temperature was, however, on the high side and similar to last year at 17.4C. 

It's supposed to be raining heavily right now, but nada. Several vineyards are reporting heavy losses of crop to birds.