Finally, rain!

Weather Station Reports from Newport Furnace

Date	Rainfall (mm)	Max Temp (°C)	Min Temp (°C)	Grass Min Temp (°C)	Mean Wind Speed (knots)	Max Gust (>= 34 knots)	Sunshine (hours)
19/07/2024	15.4	17.4	11.4	9.5	6.9

It rained quite a bit last night - more than 15 mm in Furnace, which brings our monthly total to 43.4 mm. The LTA is 86.5 for July. You can almost hear the sighs of relief. 

Everything is parched. The leaves are falling off the trees. Many trees have brown dead leaves. It's really sad to see.  Very little fruit on the trees in the orchard -- 2 red cherries that I managed to save from the birds with a bag from the vineyard. 

Alex is almost finished strumming. Cian helped with pulling the grass from around the vines. I did quite a bit of pruning and Alex is finishing off what I could not reach. If we have a crop this year, it may be a miracle. Less than 2 months to harvest. 

Marketing in viniculture

In a collaboration between master winemaker Michel Rolland and marketer Travis Braithwaite, Pangaea combines red Bordeaux grapes from France, Spain, South Africa, Argentina, and the United States to represent the best expression of earth's terroir.  Each year's blend is different, and the first release (2015) contains 44% Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa, 31% Merlot from Bordeaux, 17% Malbec from Valle de Uco, Argentina, 4% Petit Verdot from Spain, and 4% Cabernet Franc from South Africa. Only 2000 bottles were made. 

The 2016 vintage is based more on Merlot, the 2017 more on Cabernet, the 2018 is 50% Malbec, while the 2019 is an equal blend of Cabernet and Merlot with the others making up the difference. While the critics were initially brutal, the tasters have been complimentary giving the first release a 97-point score. The price is out there, but they say it's worth it. 

A good marketing gamble. A true wine of the world. 

Vineyard clean-up

 

This week, Cian pulled weeds from around the vines, and then Alex strimmed between the vines. I pruned what I could reach, and pushed all the dangling vines up and over the trellis. It looks much more tidy now but still needs mowing to mulch and clean up the debris. 

The roses are stunning this year. I've never seen so many flowers. But I am afraid the grapes will not do well as they seem to be drying up. As of 15 July, we've only had 12.1 mm of rain. 

New rescue donkeys have arrived

 

This isn't a vineyard post but pertains to the land. We needed to manage the grassland and since the nine donkeys we used to have here each summer for the last 11 years didn't come to us this year, Alex reached out to a sanctuary which, after an inspection, offered us four animals, two girls and two boys. 

On Thursday, our first three rescue donkeys arrived from My Lovely Horse Rescue in Edenderry. County Offaly. We were to receive two females, Blanche and Ursula, but at the last minute they had a new arrival, Bruce, and asked if we'd take him as well. We agreed wholeheartedly. We don't know anything about our donkeys except that Blanche is petite, young and friendly, Ursula is afraid and was likely mistreated, Bruce is older. We can't really place him age-wise, but as donkeys live to about 40 years of age, my guess would be 30+. Bruce is a sweetie, so I'd say he was abandoned because he got too old to work. 

The funny thing is that Alex's stepbrother's mother's name was Blanche, and Chris did the location scouting in Jamaica where Ursula Andress walked out of the sea in her bikini in Dr. No. How weird is that connection? And Bruce Springsteen is my favourite rock artist, so naming Brucie after the Boss fits. 

Yesterday, both Blanche and Ursula let me stroke their heads. Bruce, who had been standoffish at first as he'd only just met the girls, has now been hanging out with them which is great. Donkeys are highly social and hate being alone. Bruce comes to me when I call his name, as does Blanche. 

The other two boys will be coming later because they need to become geldings first (sorry boys, but those are the rules). So the boys are younger. They will most certainly outlive us. We know more about Archer and Zeke as they were written up by the Donkey Sanctuary in 2022 when they were rescued shortly after being separated from their mother. Lucky boys. I wasn't in love with their names and was thinking about renaming them Remus and Romulus. Or maybe something like Burrito and Jack? But I'll wait until we meet them to see how they feel. 

We are making good progress with the donkeys. All three come to me when I call them. Carrots help. But we have a funny thing happening with little Blanche. When Bruce tries to come to me, she chases him away. Is the little sweetheart a bully in disguise? Why is she chasing Brucie away? We'll have to watch this behaviour. Ursula is already looking better, with less hair hanging off her head, and she seems calmer and happier. 

I'm really loving having our own as opposed to someone else's just occupying our land. I will bond with them little by little. They are so good for the land. Their manure is excellent for composting. They tap the land gently into a healthy profile. They munch most of the grasses with joy, keeping them cropped and healthy. Need to keep the land ready for farming when necessary. 

We will be moving them around so they don't eat too much at one time, which could result in laminitis. We have a lot to learn. They will teach us. 

Ursula

Bruce

Ursula

Blanche

Wine as a tool to study climate

Medieval wine records tracking the sweetness of must are being examined for evidence of changes in the climate. It turns out that the sweetness of wine is a better indicator of climate conditions than tree rings. And the records date back to the 1400s. The sweetness of must correlates with climate better than harvest dates, which are also indicative of climate trends. 

It is not looking like a promising year for us this year. So far, the average temperature in July is only 13.7C when the LTA is 15.4. And as we have only had 11.8 mm of rain so far in July in Newport, the gardens are suffering, as are the grapes. They are tiny at this stage. All the fruit is tiny. The LTA for July is 100.9 mm. Last year we had 206.8 mm in July, a complete washout. It's the variability of extremes that may kill us. Let's hope conditions still have time to improve. 

For more insight into the history of winemaking, check out this entry in the blog of the Inquisitive Vintner. 

Summer has failed

 

The oldest known grape fossils in the west

Sixty-million-year-old grape seeds reveal how the death of the dinosaurs may have paved the way for grapes to spread. Researchers found fossil grape seeds that range from 60 to 19 million years old in Colombia, Panama, and Peru.  One of these species represents the earliest known example of plants from the grape family in the Western Hemisphere. 

The earliest known grape seed fossils found in India are 66 million years old – that’s around the time when an asteroid hit the Earth, triggering a massive extinction including the dinosaurs that altered the course of life on the planet. The extinction event had an enormous impact on plants, too. The forest reset itself in a way that changed the composition of plant life. Without large dinosaurs to prune them, some tropical forests, including those in South America, became more crowded, with layers of trees and shrubs forming an understory and a canopy.

These new, dense forests provided an opportunity. The fossil record shows more plants that used vines, like grapes, to climb up trees around this time. The diversification of birds and mammals in the years following the mass extinction may have also aided grapes by spreading their seeds.

The team named the fossil Lithouva susmanii, “Susman’s stone grape,” in honour of Arthur T. Susman, a supporter of South American palaeobotany at the Field Museum. This new species is important because it supports a South American origin of the group in which the common grape vine genus, Vitis, evolved.

Read the article for more interesting insights.