Baby, it's cold outside.
Day off.
Today’s post isn’t about politics, Trump, Iran, Israel, ICE, or how a Democrat could possibly win a congressional election in a bright-red district.
Today’s post is about frosts in my vineyard on an April morning.
The buds on my Pinot Noir and Malbec grapes began swelling about a week ago. On Friday, April 3, the temperature at the vineyard got down to 29.6 degrees. It might have been even lower if the fans I had installed last year had not come on automatically at 4 a.m. when the sensors on the fans registered 35 degrees. The fans stir up the air to mix the cold air that slides down off the Table Rocks, making its way to the lowest spot, which is my vineyard near the Rogue River.
The fans are illuminated by the spotlight at the fan’s base. They look dramatic. They are loud. It is like being outside at an airport on a dark morning, surrounded by airplanes warming their propellers.
Most of the plants look like this, a four-year-old-plant, pruned and tied to cane wire 31 inches off the ground. The white stuff on the ground is exactly what it looks like: frost, at 7:07 a.m. That black line about a foot off the ground is the irrigation drip line, currently drained and disabled. I will turn it on in a month or so.
The frost is visible on the main stem of the vine:
My farm has a frost problem because its location is a low spot where the very coldest air sinks. My melons are killed by frost, but they don’t get planted until about May 10, when frosts are unlikely, so I was able to do well with melons. But two of the three grape varieties I planted present a problem. Pinot Noirs and Malbecs bud in early frost season. The problem is exacerbated by the warm weather. Wait! Warm weather? What is it: cold or hot? The answer is both. On Saturday, the day after the frost, the high temperature in the shade was 91.7 degrees and it got to that temperature again yesterday. The early heat is accelerating the season, pushing tender buds into danger amid the big diurnal swings in temperature of early April.
I have a fancy electronic thermometer that reports and records the temperature:
Each fan uses about 15 gallons of propane per hour. Propane costs about $2.80 a gallon. On Friday the two fans each ran for five hours. Total cost: about $400.
The early morning frosts create an eerie beauty. There is the roar of the fans combined with the dawn sunlight trying to break through the morning fog. It looks like this at 7:09 a.m.:
There are a lot of steps between this frosty morning and the wine to be made from grapes from this field. The wine would have an unusual backstory. The grapes are grown on 100-percent pumice soil, a rare terroir found here and in vineyards on the side of Mt. Vesuvius in Italy and the Aegean Sea island of Santorini. The pumice blew here from the explosion of Mt. Mazama about 7,500 years ago, when Crater Lake was formed.
But the real backstory is in my history with this land, so I enjoy a morning like this by turning my mind off the noise of the political world. I experience the eerie cold morning, the frost, the roar of the fans, and the sun trying to emerge. I get a strong sense of the present and past at once.
My father and I grew Christmas trees and melons on this land 70 years ago, and his father and grandfather farmed it the 60 years before that, going back to 1883. This summer my sister’s grandson will work with me to earn money for college at Oregon State, doing the hard work that is getting harder for me to do. That’s six generations.
At 9 a.m. the sun broke through the clouds, it warmed up, and the fans shut down. Events were playing out as they should. The buds and the emerging light-green leaves seemed to have made it through the night.
It would be a shame not to savor this.
I grew up with the orange groves of southern California all around us. Development eventually destroyed the orange groves but I have great memories of those times. I remember the roar of the fans mixing the air for the orange trees. They were the “new” way of dealing with the frost. The older groves still had smudge pots. I remember the diesel smell and the smog from the soot. I greatly miss the aroma of Spring with orange blossoms!
It's nice to know that your vines likely came through this with minimal damage; their intracellular sugars and other solutes lower the freezing point in deep winter well below zero Fahrenheit, and a nudge below freezing at budbreak. Plants are wondrously resilient: imagine if you had an arm chopped off, only to grow a couple of new, perfectly functional hands at the site, and being able to generate a whole new *you* out of that severed arm.