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. 

View over what looks like a vineyard now

View from the new picnic platform

Dead Chardonnay vine

Sun dappled leaves

View from the East

Monkey puzzle log bee hive

Rondo looking good

2 yo Pinot Noir vines bearing fruit

Chardonnay - very small

7 yo Solaris

4 yo Solaris - drought damage to leaves

More Rondo - veraison has begun!

Heat wave - again!

It's Monday the 15th and the heat wave has finally broken. It was hot, dry and still. We had at least 5 days (more I think) in the high 20s and on Thursday, the thermometer in my car read 30C as I drove home from Old Head and Louisburg. I had lunch at Tia by the Sea and walked the beach at Old Head. I was very glad to have air conditioning in my car. The heat broke the old record high when it topped 37.5C in Carlow. That's hot. 

Newport Furnace registered a high of 28.5C for the week on Friday. It was scorching. Everyone says now that it's climate change but Alex remembers summers like this in the '70s when he had to ferry jerry cans of water to the islands for the cattle. We've had no rain for ages and the grapevines are parched and getting burnt by the sun. 

The Rondo is already starting to turn colour. That would make it a very early veraison. We have quite a few Pinot Noir vines producing clusters so that's very interesting. Many vines have already reached their max height. We may have a taste of Chardonnay. We'll have very little Solaris, the grape we planted the most of. 

The work on the main structure of the trellis is done and now you can actually see the trellis from the road. Alex still has to put the wires in, but that he can do over the winter. No rush to do it now as we will just be pruning the vines all back to the main trunk. It really does look like a vineyard. 

Cahill did a lovely job and even levelled out a seating area in the top corner. It will be excellent for wine tastings someday if we make it that far. 

Ghostie christening the picnic spot

Telephone poles and steel cross beams are in

Land above cleared and leveled for safety

Now we need the support wires

It's looking like a vineyard

Looking toward the picnic spot

Lovely views

Pinot Noir

Pinot Noir

Pinot Noir

Pinot Noir

Pinot Noir suffering in heat

Rondo starting veraison

Rondo turning red

Divico - a new hardy red grape variety

Divico - the Swiss cross of Gamaret and Bronner © Dr Joachim Schmid/Agroscope/Plant Grape

Our nephew alerted us to a National Geographic article about a newly engineered grape varietal called Divico. It was created in Switzerland to be a cold-resistant and disease-free vine.  Divico was named after the leader of a Celtic or Gallic tribe who led his people into battle against Julius Caesar – and now it is the name of the latest grape variety to emerge from the laboratory. So it seems logical to investigate this grape for adaptation potential in our environs. 

Divico is a red grape variety created in 1996 at the Agroscope Research Centre in Pully (in the Lavaux wine region of the canton of Vaud, Switzerland). It was further developed in a Swiss government-sponsored laboratory and released in 2013. Formerly known as IRAC 2091, Divico is a cross of two other obscure hybrids: Gamaret and Bronner. Gamaret, itself a Swiss cross of Gamay and Reichensteiner, is “valued for its early ripening and resistance to rot”. The white Bronner has good resistance to both mildews and botrytis but results in a rather 'neutral' wine. Divico has an upright habit and is easy to train. 

The resultant Divico is said to produce a deep-coloured red wine with good aromatics and a prominent tannin profile. It buds early, flowers in early June (avoiding frost damage) and ripens late. The variety has disease resistance to downy mildew (Plasmopara viticola), powdery mildew (Erysiphe necator) and grey rot (Botrytis cinerea). It is an average cropper, so it doesn't require thinning. It only became available commercially from wine nurseries in 2015 and is planted mostly in Switzerland. 

The hope is that Divico will eliminate the need for any pesticides. That feeds right into the organic and sustainable wine movements. Divona, a new white variety, has similar resistance properties. Divona was introduced to the world in October of 2018. 

I had not realised that very little red wine is produced in the UK -- only 5% of the total is red. (I'm really glad we didn't plant more Rondo). In fact, 70% of their wine production is sparkling whites. They've tested Pinot Noir but wines made in England from Pinot grapes lack colour and depth. 

A consortium of six UK vintners has been sponsoring trials by a horticultural research organisation called NIAB EMR. They've planted the first research vineyard at East Malling headed up by Dr. Julien Lecourt (julien.lecourt@emr.ac.uk). They have secured funding to establish a Wine Innovation Centre. They have also established a research winery and among the first wines to be produced was Divico with which they'd been working for three years. So in 2019, year 3, they got their first decent harvest. Not bad. 

It's too early to start planting Divico grapes. Some vintners have produced reasonably good wines from them, but others seem to have fallen short. Perhaps as one wine critic has speculated, it will take some time and we should let the wine age before testing it. 

Sources of Divico:

• https://www.winegrowers.info/vines/home.htm 
• https://www.victoriananursery.co.uk/Grape-Vine-Divico/ 

Getting creative when labour is in short supply

When our vineyard is in full production, we will no longer be able to harvest or prune everything ourselves. We will need help. I found this article about Britain's labour shortages post-Brexit quite interesting. Particularly the bit about people getting creative about what constitutes labour. At first, they were panicking about not being able to pick the crops in time. Then they started to think outside the norms. 

I especially found the idea of inviting neighbours and friends to help in exchange for a bottle of wine here and there quite lovely. You work the fields with your pals, you teach kids about growing things and harvesting, and you give them what they want - not money but the product. I love this idea. It could be the beginning of the cooperative winery concept. 

Our neighbours are all quite keen to learn something new and experience it first hand. We'll have to give it some thought. 

Back to work

The clocks changed this morning and we had forgotten to reset our alarm. So we were awake earlier than the rest of the world. The EU had voted to stop the clock changing nonsense, but deferred due to the pandemic. Bah-Humbug. 

The forecast was for heavy rain in the afternoon and evening so I got out to the vineyard right after breakfast. There was a 4 yo Chardonnay vine down with its support broken at the base. I didn't think we'd had much wind overnight. I called Alex and he immediately came up to pound in a fence post and secure the vine. It's fine, thank goodness. Then he went down to the shore to bail boats in between rain bursts. 

The land is so wet and there was evidence of new digging by the badger. I am tying up the new growth, removing the pink ribbons, and replacing tape with stretchy nylon ties. I got the Rondo-Chardonnay row done just as the rain started and the midges attacked. Boo-hoo. It was only about 11:00 am. Ghosty came to complain about the rain and to get me to return to the house. But I managed to secure the loose Solaris vines on the horizontal supports on the way down. 

At least I got the most important row done. The 2 yo Chardonnay vines had grown quite a bit and might have been whipping in the wind. Plus the pink ribbon was now very tightly bound to the vines. We lost three vines, two possibly because of the pink plastic ribbon and electrical tape. I'd like to replace those three, plus some of the others that didn't make it. 

It's raining very steadily now. It's going to be a very soggy Halloween, which we just learned originated in Tulsk, Co. Roscommon, Ireland.  So far it looks like a very mild and wet October, but I'll report the monthly figures tomorrow. 

Oh and all the wine containers have started bubbling again. Very good news.

Badger holes

Badgers like grubs

Chardonnay on the right,
Solaris on the left

A rather terrified self-isolating introverted pumpkin
this year.

“Rathcroghan, the Irish Otherworld & the Home of Halloween” 

D-Day for Harvest

17 Sep 2021, grape harvest

Yesterday was harvest day. We celebrated Alex's mom's 88th birthday in the morning, then got to work in the vineyard in the afternoon. It took several hours of persistent snipping but we ended up with a laundry basket plus a tote basket full of red Rondo grapes and half a laundry basket full of white Solaris. That's far more than last year. 

There was very little indication of disease and almost no mould. The Solaris leaves are already turning yellow and dropping. The Rondo are still green. Many of the 4-year-old Solaris had at least one bunch of grapes and a few had multiple bunches of very sweet and tasty nuggets.

There was no indication of any grapes on the newest vines (Pinot Noir and Albarino) but there is one bunch on a Chardonnay vine that is not yet ready to sample. 

I sterilised the equipment when we finished picking. We then started de-stemming on the porch until a cold wind came and forced us indoors. It will take another day to destem the red grapes, but I managed to finish the white grapes last night. We even got a harvest moon rising in the evening. 

Now for the winemaking. 

Lovely bunch

Lazy helper

Some were not ready and will be picked later

Heavy load

Juicy little morsels

Filled the RTV

Not a bad harvest

Hanging CDs helped with the birds

Destemming is hard work