What is Bud Break

Matt from Henry of Pelham Family Estates tells us about Bud Break and what this time of the season means to not only this years crop, but next years as well.

What we’re looking out here these are chardonnay vines again. When did we plant these? 1993. So these are about 15 year old plants now. These will be used for our reserved chardonnay wine. And in terms of the growth stage of the plants now, we are just at the bud break stage, the early bud break. We are just getting into our second and third leaves. So what’s important about that is up until the third leaf on a shoot after bud break, you’re relying on entirely on the reserves of the plant that was stored down on the root system back in the fall. Once you get passed three leaves like on this for now it got a fourth leaf present on the shoot so now the vine is actively starting to photosynthesize and create its own energy and nutrition for these coming years. What’s important about that for me as horticulturist and as a manager is the development of the growth from bud break to the fourth leaf is fairly slow. Once the weather turns, we get a little more heat these things are going to explode with growth over the next 8 weeks straight. They’re going to grow like crazy because they now have leaves out, they’re capturing sun, they’re photosynthesizing. Assuming the weather is going to warm up which it will, we’re getting near the end of May and then this vineyard is going to grow 2 or 3 inches sometimes in a day in terms of growth. So we’re just at the beginning of that next stage from bud break into full shoot growth and development. What you see now is entirely really influenced by last year in a sense that the buds, when we talk about bud break, these are these buds from last year’s growth that we’re looking at. That’s the piece of cane wood as we call it, our bud wood and each of this buds which is now a shoot was at the base of the leaf on last year’s growth and the bud itself which is opened up and is now the shoot. Everything we’re looking at was formed already a year ago at flowerings. The flowering period for us is a mid-June so about three to four weeks from now. So a year ago, minus 3 or 4 weeks is when everything you see there was formed and if you cut the buds open in the middle of the winter and put them in the microscope, this is what you’ll see actually. It’s already formed in there and when we do that and we do that actually we look at these buds. What’s important is we’re looking at the clusters because right now you can start to see the clusters. These are great clusters and what we want to know is from a year ago how many clusters the shoots had on them so we know when we start to prune for the following year. How many buds do you want to leave because we know each cluster is going to weigh so much and give us so much wine so we know from the year before already on how many buds and clusters we’re ultimately going to have in the coming year. It’s kind of an interesting thing. Basically, I have a sense of it because the critical point in that mid June flowering period if we have really nice sunny dry weather, what you’re going to get is more fertility in the buds. And more fertility means more clusters of grapes for the following year. Last year, 2007, we had a fabulous growing season, a fantastic flowering period. These buds therefore are very, very fertile. We’ve got lot of clusters. I know that now we’re starting to see the clusters I’ve got two in the case of this shoot there’s even a third cluster. So for chardonnay, that’s fantastic you’ve got two and three bunches of grapes per shoot that’s a lot of grapes. We’re seeing rising just as they open up 3 and sometimes even 4 clusters of grapes on this shoot. So that’s a sign we’ve got lots of grapes.