by 
What a long strange trip the 2022 growing season was. We eventually harvested but it wasn’t our best season and we didn’t harvest about off of the vines. In 2022, the weather got off to a bad start. Weather was exceptionally cooler than normal with much above normal rain for the spring period. But this coincided with a strong La Nina year with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation in a cool cycle.
Needless to say we had a very cold and wet spring. So much so that we made a decision in July to walk away from the vines and do minimal maintenance on them because things were so far behind even if it really warmed up, there was no way things would catch up. Oh boy were we wrong…
So, in this chart, you can see that I circle an inflection point in mid July where a switch turned on and it didn’t rain again until the end of October. It was hot and dry. But fortunately, not a lot of smoke because we had such a cool spring. October was so hot that we broke all kinds of records. But, as you can see below (I kept a warm, cool and average year on the chart for comparison), that that heat was pretty far ahead of average by the end of the growing season.
I had been tending the grapes normally up until early July. Keeping to the spray schedules and mowing and everything and then we decided to stop because it seemed pointless.
Somewhere in late September, we decided that maybe things would turn around as unlikely as it sounded. Finally, there was forecast of cool wet weather in the fourth week of October and the birds were starting to flock, much later than normal and we made the decision to pick. The top half of the vineyard was almost completely lost. That Pinot clone 667 has really thin skins and doesn’t do well with mildew but the 777 has thicker skins and seems to tolerate mildew much better. We ended up picking over 2000 lbs of fruit which wasn’t too bad considering we hardly did anything!
