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Weather & Climate

A collection of 284 issues

What a difference a few weeks makes: From hot to cool as we wait for a delayed harvest

If you didn't know how beautiful a fog bank can be, you haven't spent a summer in Paso Robles. Yesterday, I returned to the vineyard after a weekend in San Francisco to find that I'd somehow brought back the weather with me. The daytime

Yes, July really was hot. But veraison still arrived late. What gives?

A month ago, I felt like I was tempting fate when I characterized the 2018 summer as "benign". Well, so much for benign. July was the hottest month we've ever seen here at Tablas Creek, with an average high temperature of 96.5 and an average

A mid-summer vineyard assessment suggests 2018 is looking like a throwback to the 2000s

I feel like I'm inviting disaster just by typing this sentence, but it's been, well, benign so far this summer. I got back from two weeks in Europe, some vacation and some work, to find a vineyard significantly advanced over where it was in the first

Flowering 2018: Might We Be Seeing Our First Moderate Vintage of the Decade?

There are five viticultural markers that we use each year as markers: notable reference points that indicate where we are compared to other years. These are, in order: * Budbreak (typically late March or early April) * Flowering (typically May sometime) * Veraison (typically late July or early August) * First Harvest (typically late

Assessing Winter 2017-2018 After March's Rainfall "Miracle"

At the end of February, we were looking at a potentially disastrous winter, with less than five inches of precipitation. A major storm that arrived March 1st and dropped more than three inches of rain in 24 hours marked a major pattern shift, and the rest of March continued wet,

A Late-March 2018 Bud Break Marks a Return to a "Normal" Spring

Two months ago, I was worried. January, normally our coldest month of the year, had seen only four nights drop below freezing. After one decent storm on January 8th and 9th, the rest of the month was dry, leaving us at just 20% of normal rainfall by month-end. We ended

Winter 2017-2018 remains one of our driest ever, but at least it's gotten cold again.

Last winter's gloriously wet January and February feels like a lifetime ago. The 4.32" of rain that we've received so far this winter is less than 14% of last winter's (near-record) 31.92" as of February 12th. Yes, last winter was

A cold, dry start to winter 2017-18, but a change is (hopefully) on the way.

It's going to be no surprise to most of you to hear that it's been a dry winter so far. You don't need to look any farther than the fact that much of the Central Coast has been dealing with fires at a time

Harvest at the Three-Quarter Pole: A Return to a More Normal Time Frame, with Solid Yields

Late last week, we welcomed our first major picks of Roussanne and Mourvedre into the cellar. And with that, the home stretch of harvest officially began. There will be a lot of harvest chalkboards that look essentially like this one over the next couple of weeks: Where we are, one

Why Paso Robles is So Well Suited to Late-Ripening Grapes

This morning, when I got back to the winery after a week on the road, my first order of business was to check in on how harvest was going. I was happy to learn that things picked up a bit last week. After more than two weeks of chilly fall