Silverside Farm U-PICK
2021 Season $4/lb July 15th through August Thursday- Sunday Please check website for hours. Book online www.silversidefarm.com
3810 COBBLE HILL RD. COBBLE HILL, BC (250) 743-9149
Handling the Heat
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Chris Turyk - I love wine, a lot. I’m a Certified Sommelier, WSET Diploma graduate, and get in everyones way at unsworthvineyards.
espite the tall tales told of old vine roots penetrating deep down into subsoils, farmers sitting back letting Mother Nature bless us with the gift of grapes, and other marketing imagery, viticulture is a highly precise and well understood subset of agriculture. The most prolific question over the past month surrounds the late June heat spike, and subsequent impacts on this harvest and overall vine health. During mid June vines undergo flowering — one of the more precarious times during the vineyard calendar. Healthy flowering hinges on good weather. A warm and dry June with gentle breezes provides an ideal situation for a bountiful and pristine quality harvest, which is exactly what we got this year. Our stereotypical June-uary, on the other hand, consisting of low temperatures, limited sunshine and rain, results in spotty flowering leading to uneven ripening within clusters, aborted fruit and elevated disease pressure. With flowering complete at June’s end, temperatures spiked hotter than many of us have ever experienced in this Valley. Vine biological mechanisms engage around 35 Celsius which halt metabolic activity. Below 35C, vines happily continued around the clock growth at a breakneck
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pace. The Cowichan Valley contains excellent soils for retaining moisture — so good in fact, that metabolizing water out of the soil early in the season, is in the best interest of premium fruit production. Soil water deficit triggers the vine to concentrate efforts to produce delicious fruit instead of shoots, leaves and other vascular tissue. Without these moist soils providing vines with precious water required to continue evapotranspiration during heat waves, vines may have suffered. At the peak rate of canopy growth with no water available to sustain the growing vine, things may have not gone so swimmingly. After the vines experience a deficit in water availability, the modern Viticulturist keeps vines at measured proportions of their maximum metabolic rate. This provides many advantages, both with overall vine health but with the slight scare of water deficit, the vine will concentrate its efforts on the ripening fruit. Contrary to dry farming belief, too little water compromises vine health with no added benefit to the fruit. Too much water causes vines to over crop and dilutes flavour resulting in insipid wines, thus keeping vines in the proverbial Goldilocks zone gives us the best of flavour and crop load for many decades. With summer 2021 on the path it is on, I bet that the drip irrigation systems will activate for a few days around the time when berries change colour.
