Still

A view from the footbridge, across the frozen lake.

Yes, it's happened:

This winter is colder than last.

In fact, it's the coldest February on record.

Last year, our coldest temperatures recorded were -14 degrees F.

This year, on more than one occasion, our vineyards have registered -17 to -20 degrees. (Depending on elevation. You never realize how much temperature varies until you start recording it on multiple sensors across several acres!)

And so, the vineyard remains still, quieted and muffled under a thick blanket of snow, as winter pruning carries on, and summer planning continues.

Each day the temperature plunges, the snow sparkles all the more, beneath a prism of dazzling ice crystals.

Although cold, this winter has been exceptionally bright: a banana tree I grow at home as a foliage plant, perched in a sunny window, produced a cream-colored flower cluster for the first time ever, bursting open mid-February and blanketing the house with the scent of hyacinth, on the coldest day of the year.

The coldest February on record, but, also one of the sunniest (clear open skies contributing to the plunging mercury.)

Frost paints the banks of the old sawmill creek.

Another season for the record books.

Another winter unlike the one before.

Cold, but dazzling.

Each year's weather is registered in the flavors and aromas of the next year's vintage: I anticipate some dazzling, and unprecedented, wine for 2015.

Februa

Calendar illustration for February, from a circa 1500 Dutch manuscript.

With the turn of a calendar page, we find ourselves in our shortest month, one which derives its name from the Roman feast of purification, Februa.

In the vineyard, February remains a time of cleaning, of preparation.

February is the month when most of our vineyard pruning takes place, a brief midwinter lull to prepare the vines for the flush of luscious growth that will drive our labors from bud burst through harvest.

Crunching through snowy vineyard rows, cutting away last year's ripened canes, we take comfort knowing that we are following the rituals of an ancient calendar.

Medieval prayer books and calendars frequently had illustrations depicting appropriate seasonal agricultural tasks for each month.

For Februa's month, more often than not, the calendar scenes depict ruddy-faced laborers gathering wood, warming themselves by a fire, or, out in a vineyard, cutting vines.

The sturdy vinedressers in the Medieval calendar illustration above also provide an answer to perhaps the most common question those of us who work in a vineyard still get asked today: what do you do in the winter?

The rows of vines, the tools employed, the layers of clothing: immediately recognizable to anyone who's worked a vineyard in February, despite the passage of so much time.

If winter vineyard work remains remarkably consistent, February itself is ever changing.

Some winters, our February fields look remarkably similar to the Dutch scene above: grass a dull green, the soil soft and friable. (Although our vineyard rows are tilled with a restored 1953 Farmall tractor, not the sturdy Dutch ox depicted.)

Our North Vineyard, after a first round of pruning. Photo by Tonya Fields.

This winter and last, cold has prevailed in Canton, Ohio.

February's earth remains frozen solid, the tracks of deer and muskrats etched into icy ruts of wintry perambulations.

A mantle of snow has cloaked the vineyard since mid January, doing exactly what we want it to do: regulating the ground temperature, insulating the vines.

A persistent blanket of snow warms the North Vineyard.

One of our vineyard thermometer probes fell from the trellis wire into a snowbank on January 17th: ever since, it has recorded a temperature range of between 32.043 and 32.093 degrees Fahrenheit, with no variation, for each of the days.

Going about the rhythm of our February pruning, at times the only sound is the stainless steel snip of our pruner blades, with occasional chirps and chortles from our (supposedly) mute swans.

Despite the silence, we are a little less anxious than we were last year at this time.

Our sturdy vines survived last winter's unprecedented cold exactly as we had hoped, with the nectar of last summer's bountiful harvest perfecting itself in the safety of our winery's stainless steel tanks.

Last February 2nd, Bucky our vineyard groundhog failed to rouse himself from the warmth of his den beneath a Petite Pearl vine.

This February, the snow above his warren is untrodden again, on the cusp of Valentines Day.

We'll take Bucky's slumber to mean we expect the gelid conditions to linger, although with each passing day, the sun, when it reveals itself, feels just a bit warmer on our cheeks, and the chatter of mute swans grows louder.

Cold temperatures linger, but there is a new warmth to February's sun.

Heat

A small observation on a cold winter's day:

Although the temperatures on the thermometer may register subzero, it is a great time to witness, first hand, the awesome power of solar heat.

Pictured above are bits of vine prunings, resting on top of our insulating blanket of vineyard snow.

We pruned these vines yesterday morning. 

Despite the arctic temperatures, in the course of a January afternoon, each rosy brown twig absorbed enough solar energy to melt a little depression in the snow around it.

(You witness the same thing at the base of the young vine on the right side of the picture.)

Solar energy, absorbed from the sun, stored in the tawny bark of the vine, and radiating back out onto the snow, melting a depression.

The things that cross your mine, trudging through the vineyard on a cold winter's day.

Denizens

It's a little quieter on the grounds this time of year.

The tables on the Piazza are stowed for the season.

No festive pavilion weddings.

So the swans seemed a little curious about this new vineyard denizen.

He must have arrived last night, staying in the farmhouse,

Although statistically, we don't get a lot of snow in November, and to some this seems early, in the vineyard, we welcome it.

Our vines need cold weather early in the season to "put them to bed."

And at this point in the season, before the vines are fully hardened off, the snow is a welcome blanket, insulating the roots just a bit, until they achieve full dormancy.

Cold temperatures in November, and a bit of snow, are exactly what the vines want to see.

The swans, on the other hand, aren't so sure.

Red

Our 1952 Farmall Tractor rests at the edge of our north vineyard. A mantle of sparkling snow still lingers upon it. In the frigid March sun, its red steel glows preternaturally bright.

With apologies to the poet William Carlos Williams, who wrote so memorably so many decades ago about a now-famous red wagon glazed in rain,

so much depends
upon
a red tractor
glazed with ice
crystals
beside the white
swans.

This remarkably bright March morning, which is also remarkably cold, our snowy tractor seems to epitomize where we are in this most unusual winter season.

Normally all the apple trees in the orchard would have been pruned months ago. 

In the vineyard, we would be going through and doing a second round of pruning, to adjust the number of buds. We would begin to see the buds swell, the fuzzy down under the shiny red outer scales starting to emerge.

Of course, there is no such thing as a “normal” winter. If we harken back two Marches ago, we were sweltering in an unprecedented string of 80 degree days.

But this winter, time seems to stand still. 

It is no warmer in March than it had been in January.

The grass is still mostly crusted in snow.

The snow around Bucky the vineyard groundhog’s winter den remains untrodden.

The vineyard is still mostly unpruned, as we monitor the effects of temperatures not recorded in decades, in this the winter of the  vortex, the winter of Janus.

The vineyard sleeps.

The tractor rests.

Its red paint glows in cold but bright sun.

But on schedule, the red headed ducks that appear every February returned to Lake Gervasi a few weeks ago. They have joined our iridescent mallards, and our patient, regal swans, who circle a small patch of open water waiting for the day they may begin gathering willow branches for their yet-to-be-built nest.

The predicted arrival of the migrating ducks with the startling gray backs and crimson heads lets us know that although we are poised in a lingering chill, the days are lengthening.

The sun, though cold, is bright.

Grape vine pruning will proceed double time as soon as conditions allow. In the meantime, we cut open shiny red grape bud scales, to see if the tissue inside is vivid green, and therefore, alive. (So far, our very cold hardy Minnesota and Cornell-bred vines are holding up well.)

Perhaps I will leave our vineyard swans some grape canes, to augment the willow boughs in the construction of their still un-built nest. Red canes entwined with golden willow branches seem fitting, somehow, for a late-breaking spring.