What were the topics on most minds at the 2021 ‘Growing Season in Review’ workshops for Arizona wine grape growers? In order to find out, we asked participants to post their observations on growth-stage timing, weather events, occurrences of pests or disease, and other issues along a monthly timeline. Posts not only gave shape to the 2021 growing season in terms of these topical categories, but also detailed both impacts and responses in vineyards, as well as varieties of note. And since we weren’t able to gather for the 2020 editions of this workshop, posts also did more or less the same for the growing season that year.
The short answer to the above question is the word cloud to the right, in which the top terms are ‘harvest’, ‘2020’, ‘august’, ‘rot’, and ‘frost’. The long answer to the above question is in the following sections, where we take a closer look at these terms and some examples of them, along with a more general assessment of timeline posts.
Directly comparing the 2021 and 2020 growing seasons with workshop activities this year allowed participants to explore some uncharted territory. For during these two years, Arizona viticulture posted two new, more extreme endpoints in terms of conditions during the ripening and harvest periods. Many locations experienced near- record- to record-wet conditions in July and August in 2021 and near-record- to record- hot-and-dry conditions during those months in 2020. Sure, wet or hot-and-dry summers have occurred before. But, heading into the workshops, we nonetheless wondered if the extra rain or additional heat and drought these past two years led to intensified impacts or posed any novel challenges. Regardless of the answer to this question, we believe that experience gained in 2021 and 2020 will be especially valuable to growers as they address the more variable and extreme summer climate that is anticipated for the Southwest in coming years.