I shared a photo with you from Monday afternoon as the team of Eric Germain at Vincent Girardin were placing candles in their vines – these buds not just in the ‘cotton‘ stage but also starting to open. That said, these are the buds of the more precocious young vines – the more mature vines being less obviously advanced.
This is an important point for now – the timing of this week’s warmth and next week’s (forecast) snow and negative temperatures being exactly as per last year, but:
- The high temperatures have been less high than in 2021.
- The forecast low temperatures for the coming days will be less low than in 2021
- Given that the last few weeks of fine weather have usually started their days with morning frosts, the vines are less advanced in their growth-cycle than last year.
So – it’s still an issue for the young vines in the next days – and the Saint-Glace – the day after which the growers can forget about frosts – is still more than 6 weeks away. So what more can the growers do?
I noted on Monday that the upper part (of the lower part!) of Meursault-Genevrières was being prepared for trace electrical heating cables. This generally requires a lot of infrastructure work to bring the electricity supply into the vines – though is otherwise much more environmentally conscious than the use of candles – including the more expensive ‘organic’ candles option. Or you bring a generator into the vineyards to power the cables for the time that you’re going to need them – this was the approach of Bonneau du Martry in their vines yesterday – see the images below.
Of-course, the windmills are still an option this year as it doesn’t look like the deep Winter frost that came in 2021 is expected this year – ‘just‘ the Spring variant. These windmills are starting to crop up in the vines, in waiting. Of course, they also use their own generators to function.
Finally, just a few other photos from yesterday – including a reprehensible 12-rows, or-so, of Grands-Echézeaux vines that have been laced with herbicide. I bet the owners of the nicely ploughed rows on both sides of this dirty dozen are ecstatic!
We’ve just returned from a (necessary) week in the UK – so my harvesting this year was cut a little short – that said – my home team in Beaune still managed to finish in September, just! 
Not such a warm start – but blue sky for the morning coffee – and it’s going to reach 23°C today, possibly 26°C tomorrow. 
On Tuesday I took 90 minutes out of my harvesting duties to check in on the joint press conference of the Hospices de Beaune and Sotheby’s.
