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Weather & Climate

A collection of 293 posts

West Paso Robles Wind Flow, the Templeton Gap and the Adelaida Climate

As I've said before, it's great to have interesting friends. I got a question from one of them (Kelly Bobbitt of Mike Bobbitt Associates, vineyard mappers here in San Luis Obispo County) asking about a model that he'd created to show the incursions of

Signs of Spring

We've been getting lots of small rainstorms over the last month. It's a lot better than what we saw in January, so I'm not really complaining, but we're still missing that one big five-inch dousing that will really replenish the reservoirs and

Fog in the Vineyard

It's not foggy out at Tablas Creek very often. Our elevation (1500 feet) and the barrier of the Santa Lucia Mountains mean that neither the Salinas Valley fog that settles in areas close to town on summer mornings nor the Pacific fog that comes through the Templeton Gap

Snow in the Vineyard

We're (finally, thankfully) in a cold, wet winter weather pattern. Over the past four days we've received about 3.5 inches of rain, and it appears that we have Pacific storms dropping down out of Alaska every other day for the next ten days or so.

A little tropical rain in January

We're worried about the rainfall we've received this winter. So far, we're under seven inches total, which is behind the pace we need to be at to get to our annual average of 28 inches. And we had a very warm, dry stretch from

Ten Years of Vintage Grades: Paso Robles Report Card 1999-2008

I was called recently by the Wine Spectator, who wanted my review of the 2008 vintage in Paso Robles for their annual report card for the recently-concluded vintage (you can read the resulting article on the Wine Spectator's Web site). Distilling the complexities of a vintage down to

A frosty winter morning (and more good weather ahead!)

We're finally in a great winter weather pattern. We've seen measurable rain each of the last four days (totaling about 2.5 inches) and a couple of very cold nights in the mid-20s. It's a terrific time of year for this, as the cold

Challenges in assessing a vintage like 2008

I had a meeting with the Paso Robles Rhone Rangers yesterday, and while we were waiting for everyone to arrive we spent some time kicking around impressions of the recently concluded harvest. The general consensus was that all we were missing from our list of calamities was a plague of

End of Harvest 2008: two weeks of Mourvedre, Roussanne, and Counoise, and a better picture on yields than we'd been expecting

We're concluding the 2008 harvest today. Yesterday, we brought in 6 tons of Mourvedre, and today added another 2.5 from from a last pass through late-ripening areas where we left odd bits here and there. Yesterday's bins of Mourvedre are below: We were pleased (and

Harvest, weeks of October 6th and 13th: Lignification, Whole Cluster Fermentation and a Yield Assessment

We've had two busy weeks of harvest surrounding last weekend's cold snap. Before the freeze, we pushed to bring in the last of our Marsanne, Syrah and Grenache Blanc, our Picpoul, the bulk of our Grenache, and a significant chunk of our Roussanne. We figured that