Winter?

It is supposed to be winter, however one would be forgiven for thinking otherwise.  Whilst the vines and the trees of the Napa Valley are leaf-free, wildflowers, cover crops and weeds are thriving: a combination of rain and sunshine will do that.  The weather has been mild and the mustard and I are enjoying it immensely.  Although there is a lot of activity and pruning is well underway valley-wide, including here in Vinoland, this, to me, is the most peaceful and contemplative time of the viticultural-year.  Omphaloskepsis, anyone?

Happy Groundhog Day.

This morning in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania (in actuality, a spot called Gobbler's Knob...titter, titter), Punxsutawney Phil, the unfortunate, grudging-groundhog who is unceremoniously dragged out of his ersatz tree stump every year, saw his shadow.  I was hoping that Phil's prognostication of six more weeks of winter would perhaps be for the east coast only. But alas, the rain has returned here on the west coast.
Nevertheless, I donned my rain jacket and ventured out into the vineyard to continue with my pruning.  Surprisingly, I got quite a bit of done before the rain just got too heavy for me to carry on.  It is forecast to rain for the next 10 days, or so.  Great.  But at least it is not cold.  I am predicting that I will be experiencing a fortnight of rather soggy vineyard work.  Lovely.

On the third day of Christmas...

...I felt like I'd consumed far too many calories over the past few days, so I decided to take V2 over to Alston Park, on the west side of the valley, for an off-lead walk.  (Actually, we went over to Alston on Boxing Day also, but I didn't feel quite as, let's say, round two days ago.)  Vinodog 2 had a lot of fun and so did I.
Alston is a nice park that climbs gently up into the western hills a little way.  The views are quite pretty, north and east.  Nowadays most of the park is surrounded by vineyards (don't know whose these vines belong to).  The area looks a lot different from when I first visited the valley.  The mustard is rather abundant in this particular vineyard: everywhere is so green with all this rain we have been having.  The weather was beautiful, it had a nice crispness to it.  Couldn't have asked for better dog-walking weather.  Fun!

A tale of shortpod mustard.

Identifying common vineyard weeds and strategies for managing weed populations were the subjects being discussed last night at the Napa Valley Small Vineyard Association's quarterly meeting/wine social.  John Roncoroni, University of California Cooperative Extension Farm Advisor (Weed Science), was the guest speaker and just let me say this, he really knows his weeds.  An extensive PowerPoint presentation was followed by a lengthy Q & A session.  There was a lot of discussion about certain weeds and grasses that are becoming herbicide-resistant, although none of the guilty suspects have made it to the Napa Valley...yet.  Good stuff. 
Mr. Roncoroni is actively involved in advising farmers on all types of weed eradication (not just chemical weed control) and has an ongoing vineyard floor project at the UC Davis Oakville Station comparing several weed control practices with and without herbicides.  The day before he had held a field day in which he took groups through the Huichica Creek Demonstration Vineyard in Carneros to train attendees on how to identify and control weeds that commonly occur in vineyards.  Unfortunately, I missed it because I had to work.  Drat!

One weed that was profiled by Mr. Ronocoroni was shortpod mustard (Hirschfeldia incana).  He explained the mustard's growth habits and how it can thrive under certain vineyard conditions - those in which the weed is faced with little competition from other weeds.  I can attest to the fact that it doesn't like to compete with other weeds, as hitherto Vinoland had been an any-type-of-mustard-free zone and now there is a sizeable stand of this weed on what is normally a weed-free gravel access road to the barn.  I have to begrudgingly admit that the mustard looks very cheery and honey bees really seem to love it.  Yes, Vinoland's pollen-pluckers have been at work daily, from dawn until dusk, minding their own business whilst performing flower related bee activities.  That is until somebody (me) walked through the mustard and disrupted their apian-industriousness.  Consequently, one particular bee displayed his displeasure, perhaps because he was unceremoniously catapulted down my left welly, by stinging me on the foot.  Ouch!
I have always maintained that mustard is bad for a vineyard.  To emphasise my point of view I have been walking around like the Emperor Claudius all week.  Sigh.

Now that's a cover crop!

Why plant silly (and potentially harmful) mustard as a cover crop when you could sow every other row in the vineyard with California poppies (Eschscholzia Californica)?  Whilst poppies don't have the biomass of a legume, for instance, they do have a large taproot which could help condition the vineyard soil somewhat.  Besides, they just look gorgeous.

Frost season.

Having a cover crop in a vineyard is generally a good thing for the vineyard's health.  However, a tall cover crop (like the 5' tall mustard in the above photograph) can artificially raise the vineyard floor, thus encouraging frost to settle on the new plane which is what the top of the cover crop has now effectively become. Unfortunately, that can be right in the bud/fruit zone. Napa had a fairly hard frost event yesterday. Currently, it's 31 degrees F as I type and the roof of Vinoland's barn is white with frost - it faces west.

The folks at Far Niente mowed down their cover crop yesterday. Just when the bell beans, field peas and vetch had started to bloom and look very pretty, the rain ended, took the clouds with it and opened the door to usher in frost season.  A disked, vegetation free, dark-soil vineyard floor is the best condition in which to capture the sun's daytime warmth.  In my opinion, a cover crop is essential to soil health, but for frost protection the timing of mowing down a vineyard's cover crop is crucial to saving the grape crop.  And, that's the conundrum of cover cropping.
By the way, Happy California Poppy Day!

Pruning: Opus One.

The relatively small block of Opus One Cabernet sauvignon vines, on the corner of Hwy 29 and the Oakville Crossroad, was in the process of being pruned this morning.  A solitary vineyard worker, to my right, was busy removing last year's growth.  I could hear the trellis wires twanging, like some giant untuned guitar, as he yanked at the stubborn shoots, with their vice-like tendrils, to remove them from the trellising.
It made for a very pastoral scene (if one could just ignore the busy traffic a couple of hundred yards away), and I wished I was at home pruning in Vinoland.  

Whether the weather be nice.

At this time of year, when one season is still transitioning into the next, weird weather conditions can only be expected. In the space of one week the weather, in Vinoland, went from gloriously sunny with low 80 degree temperatures to hail and a daytime high of 54F. Last night, neighbouring vineyard fans heralded the arrival of the first post-budbreak spring frost, with their annual reminder to me of their proximity to my bedroom...at about 3 am. Such is life.

Late autumn/early winter rains, which persisted until about 10 days ago, have ensured that my particular part of the world is beautifully verdant, perhaps the lushest I have ever seen Northern California's vegetation. This means that most vineyard plants and weeds, (and I'll use the bothersome mustard as an example), seem to be having a unusually long growing season.

Recently, I was told about a neighbourhood vineyard that had purposely planted mustard in several rows of vines on either side of their driveway just to make the approach to the winery look pretty. Well yes, mustard en masse, in full bloom, does indeed look very pretty, but in my mind it is useless as a cover crop. I haven't the foggiest why anybody would go to the expense and bother of sowing mustard in their vineyard when all that effort could be put into a cover crop that would be of benefit to the finished wine (through nourishing the soil). Mustard has a very low biomass, it is not a legume as is often mistakenly thought, and most likely will take more out of the vineyard (in nitrogen - and water) than it would ever put back into the soil after disking-in as a green manure.

To add insult to injury, mustard also provides an overwintering site for the Grape Orange Tortrix (Argyrotaenia franciscana) worm/moth, a vineyard pest that can be every bit as problematic as the Grape Leafhopper.

I really had to look around for a mustard plant to photograph, eventually finding a lone example on my neighbour's property. There is no mustard in Vinoland, and if there was I'd pull it out. Even the aforementioned, mustard-enamored vineyard mowed their sunny, yellow, thigh-high crop down today as a frost damage prevention method...so it doesn't look so pretty anymore.

Weather, weeds, worms - it is a wonder that anyone chooses to be a farmer of anything, never mind wine grapes.

A beautiful day.

A glorious, unseasonably warm January day in the Napa Valley. The mustard is blooming and pruning is in full swing in certain vineyards. And, no rain is forecast for the foreseeable future. Whoo hoo!
Life is good.

Who stole all the vines?

It has been extremely foggy the past two mornings. Not the marine fog that haunts the San Francisco Bay Area all summer long, but true radiation fog, (or Tule fog as they call it here after the winter fogs that form in the expansive, low-lying San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys). I love it.
This up valley vineyard looks a little forlorn in the misty gloom of a late January morning. I am fairly certain that this vineyard, belonging to Swanson Vineyards, was formerly planted to Merlot. But whether or not the vines were diseased, no longer economically viable, or simply just old, they are history. Only the blossoming mustard and an incomplete trellising system remain as silent witnesses to the crime.

A blot of mustard.

This morning heralded a rather sunny but frosty start to my day at a chilly 29 degrees.  It was a very still morning so, perhaps taking advantage of a near perfect temperature differential, the hot air balloons were out en masse, floating high above the commuting Vinogirl below.
Also present in abundance, but in this instance very definitely planted on terra firma, was the mustard flowering amongst the vines.  The mustard has been blooming for about 3 weeks now already, perhaps the earliest I can ever remember, no doubt due to the little bit of rain we had in October.
With barely any traffic on the Silverado Trail it was a very pleasurable drive to work on this still rather Christmassy December morn.

Head above the rest.

Hidden in this mess of mustard is a head trained vine. I do not know the varietal although I could find out as Vinomaker knows its dad. Just look at it. Brilliant! I love head trained vines. Look at the permanent structure. Cast your eye over the pruning work needing to be done. Fantastic!
The grapevine is...a vine...quelle surprise! It will twist and turn its way up a tree, or anything taller than itself, in order to reach the top and...the sunlight. Truly head trained vines give little support to the actual vine except for their own established trunk. The pruner maintains an almost cartwheel-like structure on which the fruiting spurs are renewed each year. Fabulous!
The main advantage is that it is an extremely cost effective way of training. No stakes, no trellising, and in the case of a dry farmed vineyard, no costly irrigation system. The disadvantages are many. For example, greater instances of disease, heightened pest management issues, and it's bad on your back at harvest time...but like high heels, from adversity comes great pleasure.

Speaking of hoity toity...

...Vinodog 1 sometimes gets ideas above her station, but I love my little mustard queen anyway :)

Cut the mustard.

If indeed the mustard in the vineyards of northern California was first sown by Franciscan monks more than 200 years ago, it is one of the most enduring cover crop success stories ever, at least in the Napa Valley.  Due to the unusually warm January we experienced, (and the high 60's low 70's temps we have now), the field mustard (Brassica campestris) is out in full force.  It looks beautiful, contrasted against the the still dormant, skeletal looking vines.  So beautiful in fact that it inspired a whole festival dedicated just to it.  The Napa Valley Mustard Festival, in it's 16th year, attracts the well heeled of the valley's society doyens...the rest of us just live and work here. Ho hum.
There are far superior choices of cover crops that could be planted in the vineyard.  Brassicas in general can prove to be a little problematic.  For instance, B. campestris, can attract green peach aphids (Myzus persiae) that build up on the mustard during winter and early spring.  Although these aphids do not affect vineyards, they may disperse and carry diseases to other crops.  Not good.  So vineyard managers, cut the mustard, sew some subterranean clovers to smother it out and let the hoity-toity find another weed to celebrate instead.