Spring is here
The vineyards in the County are waking up for another season following a winter that had a lot of weather extremes and variability, and a spring that seems to be headed down the same path. A massive storm with a whole lot of snow hit the County at Christmas time. It was followed by a reasonably mild January, but the month closed out with a few days of deep freeze with temperatures below -30C. Lots of snow in February into the early part of March, and a mid April stretch of summer weather with temperatures well into the 20Cs.
Field workers are now arriving and are busy in the vineyards getting everything ready for persistent warmer temperatures. Which brings us to two types of spring work. In the traditional County vineyards, the tractors have been busy over the last couple of weeks starting to take down the hills that have covered the grapevine trunks and canes, and kept the vitis vinifera vines safe through the winter.
Closson Chase is one producer that continues to adopt this method and the picture below (Churchside vineyard on April 20th) shows stage one of bringing the vines back to life. Over the next couple of weeks, field workers will begin to manually move the remainder of the hilled soil off of the canes and trunks. At the same time being ever so careful not to damage the buds. The canes were tied down low in the fall to be buried, and they will be raised for the growing season.
Churchside Vineyard @ Closson Chase - April 20, 2023
Over the last few years, a number of County vineyards have either experimented with, or completely adopted the geotextile method of protecting vines through the winter. Red Tail Vineyards have gone all in with geotextile and are using them across all of their vineyards. See the picture below from April 20th of one of their vineyards on the east side of Loyalist Parkway.
With geotextiles, field workers will begin removing the rocks and soil that has been loosely piled along the edges of each sheet of fabric, and then uncover the vines for the season. The canes have also been tied down low under the fabric (as the key premise of geotextiles is to retain ground heat under the fabric). So the canes also need to be raised with care not to damage the buds. In many vineyards (that lack wind machines), the fabric will be left alongside the vine row (just in case of spring frost) so that the vines can be quickly covered on frosty nights to protect them. Once we are frost free in the County, the fabric will be cleaned, rolled up and stored until the fall. Red Tail has wind machines for frost protection in each of their vineyards (note the tower with a propeller in the right middle of the picture).
Loyalist Parkway Vineyard @ Red Tail - April 20, 2023
