VERAISON TO HARVEST Statewide Vineyard Crop Development Update #9 November 9, 2018 Edited by Tim Martinson and Chris Gerling The 2018 Growing and Winemaking Season in Review Morning clouds rise over Boundary Breaks Vineyard on Seneca Lake Photo by Tim Martinson I come to bury 2018, not to praise it. I mean, yuck. It’s Not the Heat, It’s the New York agriculture presents challenges every sea- Humidity. And the Rain. And son, but this one bordered on ridiculous. the Clouds. And the Fruit The past 15 years have brought everything from dev- astating winter freeze events to superstorms, but this Flies. is the year that many around the state are calling their most challenging ever, and these aren’t even the folks Chris Gerling who were hit with seven inches of rain over two hours Enology Extension Associate Cornell Enology Extension Program in August. I don’t have the heart to ask those people about the season, like I wouldn’t ask Mary Todd Lin- Climate charts and figures by coln how she liked the play. Hans Walter-Peterson For everyone except the north country, there was hu- Viticulture Extension Associate midity, rain and rot; the north country had humidity Finger Lakes Grape Program and a drought. We know that our winemakers have Additional observations by members of the plenty of tricks up their sleeves—it’s just that 2018 called for extra sleeves. Cornell Extension Enology Laboratory Advisory Council Winter. According to our bud mortality tracking, the 2017-2018 winter was not particularly dangerous for grapes. There was one period in January where Lake Erie and the Finger Lakes got cold enough to reach the 10% threshold for primary bud damage on some vari- eties, but for the most part temperatures stayed above zero Fahrenheit. I don’t think the lows ever reached the LT50 point in any of the places Cornell was tracking. In the north country it was much colder, but not by Chris Gerling Hans Walter-Peterrson their standards, and on Long Island it was much warm- Page 1 Early June, W. Seneca Lake. This Noiret vineyard was the site of a cov- er-crop trial (Justine Vanden Heuvel program) for the past 3 years, on a well-drained site with shallow, gravelly soils. Despite significant drought stress last year, there were only modest carryover effects (slightly reduced cluster number, cluster size) on the 2017 crop. Photo by Tim Martinson Figure 1. Monthly growing degree day accumulations at Geneva in Figure 2. Monthly rainfall accumulation at Geneva in 2018 vs. the 2018 versus the long term 40-year average. long-term 40-year average. Figure by Hans Walter-Peterson Figure by Hans Walter-Peterson er, but not by their standards. There were some lated enough heat to catch up to and then exceed storms, inasmuch as the last day of B.E.V. NY the long-term average. While the heat caught up, (February conference in Rochester) got snowed rainfall lagged behind, with April and June both right the heck out. being drier than average (Figure 2). The good/bad of winter was the late period, On Long Island, it was a cool, wet spring that Rich where the temps locked in around the mid-30s Olsen at Bedell calls “more or less the norm for and refused to budge. There was none of the the North Fork.” They started a little behind, but 90-degrees-in-March silliness we’ve seen in other these days Long Island picks up 3000 GDD with- years, and not really any significant warming as out fail. The Hudson Valley seemed to get the the calendar turned but the thermometer didn’t. lousy downstate spring and lousy upstate sum- mer, making for what Michael Migliore at White- Spring. The Growing Degree Day (GDD) accu- cliff calls “the most difficult season in 40 years of mulator pushed the snooze button, racking up a growing grapes.” measly 8.2 GDD for the entire month of April in Geneva (see Figure 1). As a participant in the Sen- Summer. By late June, lawns were actually start- eca 7 race on April 29, I know there were snow- ing to brown a bit and people upstate talked more flakes and that it was a rough day to ride a bike. I of dryness than anything else. July was also a lit- didn’t ride a bike, but I know it was a rough day tle dry, meaning that in Geneva three of the four to ride one. months from April through July were below the long term average for rainfall (see Figure 2). While it wasn’t much fun for people, the grapes were never tricked into breaking dormancy ear- That feels like a long time ago, or maybe some ly—so there was that. May did its best to make dreamed alternate reality. Whatever the feeling, up for April (at least upstate), where we accumu- “dry” is not a word I will associate with my mem- ories of 2018. • 46 Speakers • 35 Conference Sessions • 3 Full Day Workshops • 2 Co-located Conferences MARCH 19-21, 2019 • Trade Show with 230+ Exhibitors SYRACUSE, NY • Networking & Social Events OFFICIAL SPONSOR CONFERENCE SPONSOR EasternWineryExposition.com Page 2 August changed the narrative in a number of breakers, 2018 was as humid as it gets in every ways. First, there was the heat and humidity. part of the state (see Figure 3). While August was above average by GDDs, it wasn’t hugely above average, especially by recent Then came the rains. I’m part of a group that goes standards. running every Saturday morning at the north end of Seneca lake. I’ve been doing this for a few years Syracuse.com meterologist Glenn Coin looked now, and in that time we’ve seen all sorts of lake at August in Syracuse, and noted that while the activities and weather conditions. highs were 1.3 degrees warmer than average, nightly lows were 4.3 degrees warmer than aver- What I hadn’t seen until this year was piles of de- age. He then used the Iowa State Mesonet system bris washing up on shore, as if from a shipwreck. to produce an astounding chart of the summer It wasn’t from a shipwreck, of course, it was the hours with dew point at or above 70F, which is ba- remnants of the freak storm and resulting floods sically hours where it’s Too Dang Humid (TDH). that hammered the middle of the lake on August 14 and 15. Some areas received as much as seven The year 2018 had more than twice as many TDH inches of rain in two hours, and Hector received hours as the next highest year, at least in Syra- 11.3 inches over those two days (Figure 4). cuse. I looked at weather stations across the state, and found that while not all of them were record- Water destroyed fields, roads and bridges, and the landscape still shows plenty of scars. That catastrophic event was like some almighty on- switch, and it feels like New York hasn’t gone a week without significant rain since then. Figure 4. On August 14, between 2:00 and 7:00 AM, this vineyard- based weather station on east Seneca Lake logged a total of 7 inches of rain, at a rate of up to 1.5 inches per hour (top). Just across Figure 3. Hours with dew point above 70 °F during June, July, and the laske in Dresden (bottom), rainfall was much less intense—and August in four regions of New York. dropped ‘only’ 2.3 inches on August 14. Photo by Tim Martinson Figure by Tim Martinson Page 3 Stream bed on east Seneca Lake scoured by the August 14 flood. Photo by Tim Martinson Meanwhile, just across the lake near Dresden, the rainfall ‘only’ totaled 2.3 inches, and the flash- flood produced little damage to infrastructure or Figure 6. Hours at Dew Point 70F or Higher in September. Note: Blue vineyards (Fig. 4, bottom). shading indicates years with missing data. My interpretation is that non- Geneva received relatively little of the August blue years with no bar just had very few or no hours of dew point 70F Figure by Chris Gerling Deluge, but you can see that we still doubled the long-term average for the month. And when it Again in 2018 we were in desperate need of a didn’t rain, it was cloudy. August featured more warm, dry September and October to boost ma- cloudy days at 1 pm than any on record at the turity and ease disease pressure. Spoiler Alert: no Penn Yan airport (Figure 5). dice. Maybe it was the damage already done by the hu- midity (Figure 6). Maybe it was the rain, which never left for more than three days in a row. Maybe it was a combination of these factors or other factors that were harder to perceive, but for whatever reason, sometime around September 15th the rot index went from suboptimal-but-man- Figure 5. Days With Cloud Cover at 1pm, Penn Yan Airport. ageable to Zombie Apocalypse, Vineyard Edition. Figure by Chris Gerling Fall. Labor Day felt a little like the bell to end a round in a boxing match between grapes and mother nature—a boxing match that was not going par- ticularly well for the grapes. What had begun with reason- able hopes and relative success had somehow gotten wildly out of hand, and now we could only hope to escape without too much more damage.