Senescence

The last few winters have provided some gorgeous vineyard scenery.

But there are enough pretty snow scenes on the vineyard blog: Janus, Vortex, Romance, Shadows.

Today's post takes us back to the golden glow of autumn.

October 29, 2014

2014 turned out to be an exquisite season of cane ripening, the benefits of which we are now seeing, after this, the coldest February on record.

Scrolling through four years of vineyard records and photographs, and two years of blog posts, it occurs to me that fully inhabiting each season, as it unfolds, is one of the great pleasures of tending the earth.

Each season, as you live it, seems so epic and permanent.

But, of course, scrolling through the photos tells a different story.

Aromella vines in the South Vineyard, October 21, 2014

Each season, of course, passes as it should, seemingly endless summer folding into languid fall.

But as you catalog one, two, three, four (and counting) rotations around the sun, on the same little patch of terrain, you also come to see that each winter, each spring, each summer, and yes, each mellow autumn, also differs markedly from those that came before.

It is easy to remember scorching dry summers and cool wet ones, mild green winters and frigid snowy ones.

Autumn, however, sometimes blurs into sameness.

But just because autumn may be a mellow season, don't assume it is dull: it is a time of dramatic and rapidly shifting light, of sudden gusts, of startlingly vibrant colors that increase just as the life force of a season slowly subsides.

And each autumn can differ markedly from those that came before.

Looking back, the autumn of 2014 was among the most lovely in the vineyard.

Sure, there have been seasons when the fence rows, bedecked with scarlet Virginia Creeper, buttery orange sassafras, and clear lemony cottonwood, have stolen the show.

Sassafras leaves, September 2012

But this fall, the vines themselves mellowed to their distinct varietal hue, with a vividness we haven't previously achieved.

In the South Vineyard, our four varieties, climbing a gentle slope from the mill creek, created a distinctive pattern of ascending horizontal stripes, as each variety, in its own time, shed its chlorophyll, to display inherent hues previously cloaked by green.

October 15, 2014

In the vineyard we always think a season or two ahead, and watching those colors stripe the hillside, we knew that this was a sign of nearly perfect post-harvest ripening conditions.

In the vineyard, each year we ripen not just that summer's grape crop, but more importantly, after the fruit is plucked, we ripen the canes themselves.

Future seasons' crops are latent in buds within those canes, as they mature through autumn from green to a fully ripened tawny brown.

Those vivid foliage colors we witness, and the more subtle progression of the cane's coloration, are senescence: the highly ordered and genetically regulated process through which an organism, or one of its parts, progresses after maturity.

In the leaves of the grapevine, we witness senescence in the mutable color of leaves, from green to lemon yellow (or russet or purple or crimson) as the variety's genetics dictate.

In the shoots that arose so rampantly over the course of an endless summer, we witness senescence in a progression from apple green shoots in the spring, to olive in autumn, to a tawny or rosy winter brown. We watch supple vegetative shoots ripen to become woody canes, a process called "hardening off," in preparation for impending winter chill.

Vivid fall leaf color told us that the leaves had supped an optimal amount of light, and created optimal fuel, for the permanent vine they feed.

This winter, those rosy brown canes we sliced open in the warmth of the vineyard office, to reveal the startlingly green and living bud within, told us the canes had luxuriated in an optimal autumn, preparing themselves to survive what turned out to be temperatures below what some of our varieties should be expected to survive.

Slicing open one dormant bud after another in the warmth of the vineyard office, we are pleased but not surprised by the vivid green within.

Those vivid autumn colors told us exactly what to expect, in the nadir of our coldest winter.

October 21, 2014