06/02/08 Grape Update

Grape Update. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. The grape is growing. The weather has been playing with some of the other fruit crops, cherries in particular but how are the wine grapes coming? SCHARLAU: Actually the Washington wine grape industry is looking very good. We were fortunate to have a late bud break and so really weren't affected as a crop in Washington by the spring frost that unfortunately reeked a little bit of havoc in a few of other of our brethren in the fruit industry. That's Vicky Scharlau with the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers. Having a late bud break helped miss the frost but: SCHARLAU: At this point it could mean a lot of things. It's a little bit too early to tell. Largely it will depend on what Mother Nature does to us in the next couple of months. We will know more once we get into full blooms. So we'll see bloom in early June, probably by the 5th to the 10th and then we'll be looking for full bloom by the middle of the month and that will tell us a whole lot more but the crop potential right now looks fabulous. Last years wine grape crop estimate was over 127-thousand tons. Scharlau says it's still too early to guess on this years crop. SCHARLAU: We could see an additional size crop when we start doing our crop estimates in late July but we really won't know that because not only will it depend on how the bloom comes along through June but it will also depend on every year the clusters decide if they're thin or they're thick or they're heavier or they're lighter. Time will tell. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.