Despite the cold, wet spring the vines have valiantly produced flowers, and have optimistically set a plentiful-looking crop. This is certainly a relief to growers and winemakers alike, who have been concerned about the difficult spring weather and the effect it may have on the 2010 vintage.

The only lasting impact from the wet spring has been to delay fruit development by about two weeks, which has most of us hoping for a warm, dry September and October.

That other pesky weather event of 2010, the May frost, has had the unfortunate, albeit not unexpected, effect of peppering certain areas of the vineyard with secondary shoots, whose clusters are forming yet another two weeks behind the already-delayed primary clusters.

The photo above (from July 7th) shows a still unopened, recently formed flower-cluster, from a secondary shoot, while the cluster on the lower right has already finished flowering and has set fruit – yes, those little green balls will become ripe, golden berries on this Viognier vine (or so we hope).

Few people want to harvest a vineyard block twice, picking the primary clusters on the first pass and the secondaries on the next (not to be confused with the small secondary clusters that emerge later in the season from lateral growth up higher in the vine’s canopy). For that reason, and to avoid the possibility this fall of mistakenly picking undeveloped clusters into a bin of otherwise ripe fruit, these secondary clusters will be removed at the time of leaf thinning, within the next week or two.

And quality? Of course we all want to be able to predict what sort of promise the vintage holds, but the truth is that at this point there are far too many variables at play. So far the summer is dealing us a very good hand, providing plenty of sunshine without excess heat, so the vines are able to photosynthesize as much as they’d like. The next point of reckoning will be at seed-hardening, when we’ll glance at the calendar again and see whether we’ve made up any of the lost time.