Salisbury Vineyards

February 2007

“Baby, Its cold out there”! Snow in Malibu, ice storms in Texas and across the country, and then snow, black ice, frozen rain, record cold weather in the teens in SLO County. It makes you think that the predictions 30 years ago about us entering an “Ice Age” were closer to the truth than Global Warming.

The vineyards probably will come through fairly well because we are in dormancy. In our Paso vineyard, we have had winter kill in the vineyard when the vines were younger and in the lower spots in the field where the cold pools up. We are concerned about some of the Syrah on Cab grafts. Damaging cold flows like water and is usually not a big problem on hills or when the weather is in the high 20’s and low 30’s. But when it is in the low 20’s and below for any extended time, there is not much you can do especially with evergreen plants and trees. In the spring when the leaves are emerging is when vineyards are at risk with frost.

The recent articles about how a global warming may affect agriculture were pretty dire for winegrapes in California especially Napa, Sonoma, the Central Valley, and perhaps Paso Robles. Avila Valley and Squire Canyon should be all right because of our geography with the surrounding hills and closeness to the ocean. We will always be the coolest growing area in the County because we farm in a hole in the ground and should escape the problems of any higher average temperatures. During the record heat spell this summer in California, we didn’t really see any major increase in hot weather because the warmer it gets inland the more there is fog in the Bay which keeps our Valley cooler.

Our contribution to combating the proposed global warming, but mostly for a sustainable alternate fuel supply, is our Bio-Diesel project with the UC Extension Service and Cal Poly. We will be growing safflower on the bottom land we lease from the Land Conservancy in Squire Canyon south of the apple orchard on San Luis Bay drive on both sides of San Luis Creek. The east field will be the site for processing seed in our portable bio-diesel manufacturing machine to which we will add some methanol and potash to the seed oil to produce a 100% bio-diesel product to run our tractors. The leftover meal has up to 50% protein which is excellent feed for livestock. The ultimate goal is to come up with a way to process into Bio-Diesel the hundred of thousands of tons of grape seeds that are just being spread back into the fields as organic material. More on this as we go along. “Let them pound sand – farmers are growing the oil” will be our motto.

Our problem is the lack of rain. We are at 36% of average when we thought we would be inundated with water because of El Nino. This year’s El Nino is clobbering the Northwest. Seattle is over 200% of average rainfall and Cabo San Lucas to the south is also way over normal. California seems to be in the middle and getting squeezed out of the rainfall action. We have started irrigating the vineyard a little to keep the moisture level up and also to check out the irrigation system for any freeze damage. The only good thing about the lack of rain is that we are ahead of schedule with our pruning. Kanpai (Japanese-dry your cup!)