Checking Vine Damage

Checking Vine Damage

Checking Vine Damage. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The wine industry is taking stock after a couple of cold snaps hit the region. Michelle Moyer with WSU-IAREC says they are putting together the information as it comes in.

MOYER: Around Thanksgiving, we’re referring to it as the Thanksgiving freeze in some areas it dropped as low as -13 degrees and vines were essentially not ready to handle that yet and so a lot of places did receive some damage both to buds and then to the actual grape vines, the permanent structures of the wines.

She says they have heard from a number of growers regarding the cold temps and the extent of the damage is extremely variable depending on locations...but then it happened again.

MOYER: We also hit another cold spell at the end of February that got right around 0 degrees in some areas and that was like a double whammy to the vines as well. So that’s kind of what we are dealing with in terms of the over-wintering cold damage. Some years we do get that cold but it’s the timing of when the grapes are actually becoming cold acclimated.

She says that it depends on your approach as to how to handle the cold.

MOYER: A lot of growers are actually practicing a wait and see which is they’re doing very minimal pruning on their vines and waiting for bud break to occur and then going out and accessing how much damage they have and then doing various training techniques to try to at least get something out of their crop this year.

More on Monday.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.

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