Senescence

The last few winters have provided some gorgeous vineyard scenery.

But there are enough pretty snow scenes on the vineyard blog: Janus, Vortex, Romance, Shadows.

Today's post takes us back to the golden glow of autumn.

October 29, 2014

2014 turned out to be an exquisite season of cane ripening, the benefits of which we are now seeing, after this, the coldest February on record.

Scrolling through four years of vineyard records and photographs, and two years of blog posts, it occurs to me that fully inhabiting each season, as it unfolds, is one of the great pleasures of tending the earth.

Each season, as you live it, seems so epic and permanent.

But, of course, scrolling through the photos tells a different story.

Aromella vines in the South Vineyard, October 21, 2014

Each season, of course, passes as it should, seemingly endless summer folding into languid fall.

But as you catalog one, two, three, four (and counting) rotations around the sun, on the same little patch of terrain, you also come to see that each winter, each spring, each summer, and yes, each mellow autumn, also differs markedly from those that came before.

It is easy to remember scorching dry summers and cool wet ones, mild green winters and frigid snowy ones.

Autumn, however, sometimes blurs into sameness.

But just because autumn may be a mellow season, don't assume it is dull: it is a time of dramatic and rapidly shifting light, of sudden gusts, of startlingly vibrant colors that increase just as the life force of a season slowly subsides.

And each autumn can differ markedly from those that came before.

Looking back, the autumn of 2014 was among the most lovely in the vineyard.

Sure, there have been seasons when the fence rows, bedecked with scarlet Virginia Creeper, buttery orange sassafras, and clear lemony cottonwood, have stolen the show.

Sassafras leaves, September 2012

But this fall, the vines themselves mellowed to their distinct varietal hue, with a vividness we haven't previously achieved.

In the South Vineyard, our four varieties, climbing a gentle slope from the mill creek, created a distinctive pattern of ascending horizontal stripes, as each variety, in its own time, shed its chlorophyll, to display inherent hues previously cloaked by green.

October 15, 2014

In the vineyard we always think a season or two ahead, and watching those colors stripe the hillside, we knew that this was a sign of nearly perfect post-harvest ripening conditions.

In the vineyard, each year we ripen not just that summer's grape crop, but more importantly, after the fruit is plucked, we ripen the canes themselves.

Future seasons' crops are latent in buds within those canes, as they mature through autumn from green to a fully ripened tawny brown.

Those vivid foliage colors we witness, and the more subtle progression of the cane's coloration, are senescence: the highly ordered and genetically regulated process through which an organism, or one of its parts, progresses after maturity.

In the leaves of the grapevine, we witness senescence in the mutable color of leaves, from green to lemon yellow (or russet or purple or crimson) as the variety's genetics dictate.

In the shoots that arose so rampantly over the course of an endless summer, we witness senescence in a progression from apple green shoots in the spring, to olive in autumn, to a tawny or rosy winter brown. We watch supple vegetative shoots ripen to become woody canes, a process called "hardening off," in preparation for impending winter chill.

Vivid fall leaf color told us that the leaves had supped an optimal amount of light, and created optimal fuel, for the permanent vine they feed.

This winter, those rosy brown canes we sliced open in the warmth of the vineyard office, to reveal the startlingly green and living bud within, told us the canes had luxuriated in an optimal autumn, preparing themselves to survive what turned out to be temperatures below what some of our varieties should be expected to survive.

Slicing open one dormant bud after another in the warmth of the vineyard office, we are pleased but not surprised by the vivid green within.

Those vivid autumn colors told us exactly what to expect, in the nadir of our coldest winter.

October 21, 2014

Still

A view from the footbridge, across the frozen lake.

Yes, it's happened:

This winter is colder than last.

In fact, it's the coldest February on record.

Last year, our coldest temperatures recorded were -14 degrees F.

This year, on more than one occasion, our vineyards have registered -17 to -20 degrees. (Depending on elevation. You never realize how much temperature varies until you start recording it on multiple sensors across several acres!)

And so, the vineyard remains still, quieted and muffled under a thick blanket of snow, as winter pruning carries on, and summer planning continues.

Each day the temperature plunges, the snow sparkles all the more, beneath a prism of dazzling ice crystals.

Although cold, this winter has been exceptionally bright: a banana tree I grow at home as a foliage plant, perched in a sunny window, produced a cream-colored flower cluster for the first time ever, bursting open mid-February and blanketing the house with the scent of hyacinth, on the coldest day of the year.

The coldest February on record, but, also one of the sunniest (clear open skies contributing to the plunging mercury.)

Frost paints the banks of the old sawmill creek.

Another season for the record books.

Another winter unlike the one before.

Cold, but dazzling.

Each year's weather is registered in the flavors and aromas of the next year's vintage: I anticipate some dazzling, and unprecedented, wine for 2015.

Februa

Calendar illustration for February, from a circa 1500 Dutch manuscript.

With the turn of a calendar page, we find ourselves in our shortest month, one which derives its name from the Roman feast of purification, Februa.

In the vineyard, February remains a time of cleaning, of preparation.

February is the month when most of our vineyard pruning takes place, a brief midwinter lull to prepare the vines for the flush of luscious growth that will drive our labors from bud burst through harvest.

Crunching through snowy vineyard rows, cutting away last year's ripened canes, we take comfort knowing that we are following the rituals of an ancient calendar.

Medieval prayer books and calendars frequently had illustrations depicting appropriate seasonal agricultural tasks for each month.

For Februa's month, more often than not, the calendar scenes depict ruddy-faced laborers gathering wood, warming themselves by a fire, or, out in a vineyard, cutting vines.

The sturdy vinedressers in the Medieval calendar illustration above also provide an answer to perhaps the most common question those of us who work in a vineyard still get asked today: what do you do in the winter?

The rows of vines, the tools employed, the layers of clothing: immediately recognizable to anyone who's worked a vineyard in February, despite the passage of so much time.

If winter vineyard work remains remarkably consistent, February itself is ever changing.

Some winters, our February fields look remarkably similar to the Dutch scene above: grass a dull green, the soil soft and friable. (Although our vineyard rows are tilled with a restored 1953 Farmall tractor, not the sturdy Dutch ox depicted.)

Our North Vineyard, after a first round of pruning. Photo by Tonya Fields.

This winter and last, cold has prevailed in Canton, Ohio.

February's earth remains frozen solid, the tracks of deer and muskrats etched into icy ruts of wintry perambulations.

A mantle of snow has cloaked the vineyard since mid January, doing exactly what we want it to do: regulating the ground temperature, insulating the vines.

A persistent blanket of snow warms the North Vineyard.

One of our vineyard thermometer probes fell from the trellis wire into a snowbank on January 17th: ever since, it has recorded a temperature range of between 32.043 and 32.093 degrees Fahrenheit, with no variation, for each of the days.

Going about the rhythm of our February pruning, at times the only sound is the stainless steel snip of our pruner blades, with occasional chirps and chortles from our (supposedly) mute swans.

Despite the silence, we are a little less anxious than we were last year at this time.

Our sturdy vines survived last winter's unprecedented cold exactly as we had hoped, with the nectar of last summer's bountiful harvest perfecting itself in the safety of our winery's stainless steel tanks.

Last February 2nd, Bucky our vineyard groundhog failed to rouse himself from the warmth of his den beneath a Petite Pearl vine.

This February, the snow above his warren is untrodden again, on the cusp of Valentines Day.

We'll take Bucky's slumber to mean we expect the gelid conditions to linger, although with each passing day, the sun, when it reveals itself, feels just a bit warmer on our cheeks, and the chatter of mute swans grows louder.

Cold temperatures linger, but there is a new warmth to February's sun.

Heat

A small observation on a cold winter's day:

Although the temperatures on the thermometer may register subzero, it is a great time to witness, first hand, the awesome power of solar heat.

Pictured above are bits of vine prunings, resting on top of our insulating blanket of vineyard snow.

We pruned these vines yesterday morning. 

Despite the arctic temperatures, in the course of a January afternoon, each rosy brown twig absorbed enough solar energy to melt a little depression in the snow around it.

(You witness the same thing at the base of the young vine on the right side of the picture.)

Solar energy, absorbed from the sun, stored in the tawny bark of the vine, and radiating back out onto the snow, melting a depression.

The things that cross your mine, trudging through the vineyard on a cold winter's day.

Denizens

It's a little quieter on the grounds this time of year.

The tables on the Piazza are stowed for the season.

No festive pavilion weddings.

So the swans seemed a little curious about this new vineyard denizen.

He must have arrived last night, staying in the farmhouse,

Although statistically, we don't get a lot of snow in November, and to some this seems early, in the vineyard, we welcome it.

Our vines need cold weather early in the season to "put them to bed."

And at this point in the season, before the vines are fully hardened off, the snow is a welcome blanket, insulating the roots just a bit, until they achieve full dormancy.

Cold temperatures in November, and a bit of snow, are exactly what the vines want to see.

The swans, on the other hand, aren't so sure.

Tasks

One of the most persistent misconceptions about vineyard work is that most of it takes place in summer.

Entirely understandable, since grapes, with their luxurious green leaves and delectable sweet fruits, seem the very essence of summer.

But truth be told, in the fall, winter, and spring, a LOT of behind the scenes work goes on.

Most of the summer, we are highly visible in the vine rows, attempting to wrestle rampant vine growth onto an orderly trellis.

In all the other months, our work is more varied.

One small task after the harvest, all of our row netting needs to be removed from the trellis and stored.

To expedite the process this year, I devised this contraption:

Like many of the world's great inventions, it started as pallets, scrap lumber and threaded pipe.

Five acres of bird netting, now spooled, neatly stacked, and stored.

What's on board for November?

Record keeping, trellis repair, equipment maintenance and inventory, weed control.

In December, we'll prune the orchard, and in the vineyard, prune and weigh canes from a random sample of vineyard vines across all six vineyard blocks, to assess this past season's growth, and plan dormant season pruning, which begins mid-January in earnest.

Tomorrow

Late summer days in a vineyard, the bounty borne by years of patient nurture drips from the vines.

Aromella clusters in the South Vineyard, September 2014

Clusters of amber, bronze, apricot, and deep purple bear a perilous, and transitory, prosperity.

With each passing day under a slanting September sun, the color deepens.

The fruit sweetens.

As the crop ripens, birds circle overhead, menacingly.

We worry about our perilous prosperity, borne as fragile fruit.

On misty vineyard mornings, a doe and her speckled fawns seek to breach the bird netting, and sample forbidden fruit.

As the poet observed, nothing gold can stay.

And that goes for September, which swept in with a blaze of goldenrod along the creek bed, and the transitory bounty of the crop this golden month bears.

Before we turn the page to October and autumn’s demise, all of the fruit, or that which does not succumb to the appetite of the creatures with whom we share this temporary paradise, will be harvested from the vines.

Frontenac Gris in the North Vineyard, September 2014

Our winged and hoofed friends sweep in to glean what remains.

There comes a day, after the last harvest, when we walk the denuded vineyard rows, where the jeweled tones of the crop we nurtured are replaced by lemon yellow leaves, with the first crinkles of brown fringing their edges.

The skeletal remains of rejected grape clusters, stripped clean by crows, litter the vineyard turf.

We’ll allow ourselves our moment of melancholy.

And then we shift gears to next year, the bounty of future harvests, the rich nectar now safely aging in winery tanks.

A sign on a piece of aged barn wood in my backyard reads: to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.

In the vineyard it is perpetually tomorrow.

No sooner are the last grapes plucked from the vines, than attention turns to next year.

Furrows are tilled.

Bird netting rolled.

Nursery orders placed.

Canada geese, flying in a perfect wedge, migrate overhead. Their somber call dissipates into the horizon.

On these October days of fading goldenrod, something about the plaintive wail of migrating birds makes me think that they understand what we ourselves have come to know:

Each tomorrow brings us closer to another golden season, a tomorrow in which we dream of another bountiful harvest, dripping from the vines, in extravagant jeweled tones.

The bounty of our acres, on display at our harvest festival, September 2014.