MAWBY Vineyards & Winery says last year’s arctic temperature and this year’s mild winter has had different impacts on their vineyard.
“At this point in the season we could get very extreme cold events,” says Megan Budd, vineyard manager at MAWBY Vineyard and Winery.
Budd says an extreme cold episode is her biggest fear. “With the vines not being as hearty as they normally would be at this time, we could get damage to the vines.”
Compared to last year’s extreme cold, Budd says her vines could potentially not survive a late winter this year. “Anything below 0 degrees I would start worrying about each bud potentially dying, where normally I wouldn’t start to worry until we were below negative five.”
Before winter starts, Budd prunes the vines, determining how many buds she leaves or cuts off.
The buds she leaves determines how much crop she’ll have next year.
“We’re very hopeful at this point through the winter that we’ve gotten away with, you know we’ve made it three quarters of the way through the extremely cold months, and so if we can ride out the next few weeks without any truly extreme cold weather we should be in good shape.”
However, the mild winter poses another battle, pests. Without a consistently cold winter – insects, fungi and diseases could survive.
Partner at MAWBY Vineyard and Winery Peter Laing says, “Throughout the growing season there’s different pests, we kind of have early on in the growing season we have a lot of rose shares, which will eat the foliage and if there’s a huge population of those, they’ll just exfoliate the vine.”
So as much as Budd would like to predict the weather, she, and other winemakers like her, will have to wait and see.
Budd says, “The things that affect me the most is because things are so unpredictable.”
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