Yesterday marked the official end of the growing season and what a season it was, amiright?? 2023 has proven to be polarizing. For some growers and winemakers, this was a remarkable year for quality, and others are just thankful to have crop insurance. Let’s take a look at why this is.

I wrote about how 2023 was shaping up back in July when I looked at how Growing Degree Days (GDD) were stacking up compared to other years. GDDs are typically calculated by taking the average of the daily minimum and maximum temperature and subtracting a base number, in this case 10°C (50°F). Back in July, most places sampled were around 300 GDDs behind previous years. After rerunning the temperature data this week, it looks like the season never caught up.

Here's a look at Growing Degree Days in Alexander Valley 

The difference in some locations was extreme. At this vineyard in Eastern Paso Robles, this year was between 300 and 800 GDDs behind! 

Early season woes

Back in July we had just come out of an exceptionally wet and persistently chilly winter and early spring, which had delayed budbreak to what we used to thing of as a “normal” time for buds to start pushing. This meant the ugly frost season that characterized 2022 and 2021 spared us this year. However ongoing cold temperatures throughout the spring kept holding the season back and made for a long and drawn-out bloom period. As of July, it was already apparent that many vineyards had been hit with shatter…hard.

It’s worth mentioning that the shatter situation this year was certainly a learning experience when it comes to meso and even microclimate. Bloom was so stretched out this year that your set really depended on what stage your particular vineyard was in when the temperature dropped. In some places, there was great set and crappy set in the same block.

The vines’ phenological cycle is mostly driven by spring temperatures. When that is late, the whole season is shifted and making up for lost time is just not going to happen. Where we saw poor set (and in many cases even where we saw good set), we also saw uneven berry development. When berries set at different times, even within a cluster, the clock starts ticking for them at different times and persists throughout their development. Veraison was very late this year and when it finally arrived it also took forever to wrap up. Seems like there were hard, green berries remaining on clusters for weeks even after veraison had begun.

Why is this a great year?

For some growers 2023 is looking to be a great year. Some winemakers were raving about excellent quality despite the fact that some vineyards pulled off record yields. The record yield part probably has to do with the water we got this winter. Vines went into the spring with a nice full soil profile. This had a huge effect in the Central Coast, where for the last few years growers have relied solely on early season irrigation to promote canopy development. Not only did vines have plenty to drink, they also had access to more nutrients than usual since they could tap into the entire soil mass as opposed to just the small volume of moist soil under the drip emitters. If the weather spared you, you probably had pretty good set because you had a nice big canopy to support flowering. Then all you had to do was ripen it…foreshadowing…

This is a long one. Click here to read the full article.

End of Season Sale!

Want to invest in climate-tracking technology for your vineyard? Maybe you want to improve irrigation efficiency? How about well-monitoring?

Or maybe it's the end of the season and you don't want to even think about next year?

I hear ya. That's why we're offering 10% off all equipment sales from now through the end of the year. Make your budget stretch further. 

Contact loni@advancedvit.com for more information. 

Harvest 2023 Growing Degree Days