We made it through March with warmer than normal temperatures — the mercury hit 70 degrees a couple of times, and the National Weather Service was correct with its forecast.
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Chris Scholomiti
Special to The Citizen
I think I jinxed us in my last column about this uneventful winter in the Finger Lakes. In February we had some real snow, maybe 2 feet, then mid-month the old polar vortex showed up. We recorded minus 1 degree Fahrenheit early in the morning of Feb. 13 in our Fosterville vineyard, but fortunately that was a single episode, with temperatures moderating quickly, but still cold. I guess the old saying, âif you donât like the weather in central New York, wait five minutes and itâll changeâ holds true!
I attended a webinar recently, the Eastern Viticulture and Enology Forum, about production practices affecting fruit quality in cold, hardy âMinnesotaâ cultivars. Most wine grapes in the Finger Lakes are either vitis vinifera (the old world European native grapevines) such as Riesling, chardonnay, cabernet franc and French-American hybrids (interspecific crosses between American grape species and the vitis