Flinn

Look, if I wasn't so well educated, I would be swearing by now.. wait, I'M NOT well educated, so .. *runs to a window, a stream of foul words can be heard, dispersing in the thin air*..

As you can imagine, I don't have good news. I spare you the pictures because I'd rather blind myself than conserve any memory of this year. Basically, it's not even July, and I'm already sure I'm not going to make my own wine, because 80% of the possible production is gone.

But let me go by steps.

This late Spring in Italy we had a huge amount of rain (including various floods and some deaths), luckily in my area we didn't have any major event, but we really had rain every day, sometimes for the whole day, from mid April to mid June; hot weather has become to be stable only about 10 days ago, around the 15th of June. So, as it is obvious, the early growth of grapes has been stunning, and the season promised to be awesome... alas, seldom the promises of the Spring are confirmed by the facts of the Summer...

I check my vineyards every week, past Saturday (I mean, the 17th) everything was still perfect and the promises kept growing.. this Saturday (the 24th), the drama has already consumed.. it only took 1 week of sun and fog in the morning, for the Peronospora to devastate 500 trees and wipe out all those promises. If you are not familiar with what the Peronospora is, check here; anyways, the final result is both simple and brutal: the single grapes will start to dry and die, sometimes the full stalks dries out and the whole production is lost... believe me, it's a horrible thing to see and the worst is that it can hit anytime between Spring and Autumn. The very bad thing of this year's event, is that it hit in a very short time frame (1 week, basically) and in a moment when almost no one wasn't expecting it (I certainly wasn't .. ).

Spoiler for this is a typical damage to stalks caused by Peronospora, not my pic, taken from internet...: 

Now, I have to do a mea culpa, atl partly, and also accept the fact that such things can happen, especially to those like me who does a biologic production. First, I should do a mea culpa, because I could have been more careful and check the vineyard every couple of days in this period, because the past weather was exceptional in many regards and I should have been ready, but to my defense I can say that it's the first time that anything like that happens in over 30 years and that even elder people, who have like 50 or 60 years of experience, have been caught off guard. Also, as you know, I'm practicing a bio protocol for growing my grapes and making my wine, which means that I reduce to the minimum the quantity of interventions with any chemical product in the vineyard as well as using less aggressive products (for the general environment I mean). So it is possible that even if I were more careful and had intervene earlier, that would not have saved the grapes at all, but maybe only some 10 or 20% (or maybe even not those).
As a matter of fact, only those who normally do a full chemical, industrial and aggressive treatment of vineyard or olive trees have been able to save the day, even if not entirely.. and that's a kind of thing I won't do in any case, so maybe all in all this year's production was doomed in any case, for me atl, no matter what.

Anyways, I really need the patience of a Saint this year and I have to be honest, I've very close to become irremediably pissed off with the whole situation; it's a lot of efforts, either personal or economic (depending if I do most of the works myself or if I hire someone for the most tiring ones), and for the good and for the bad it's now 32 years that I've been doing this thing, so enthusiasm is long gone.
Remember that I'm doing this as a hobby, it's not my main source of income (it's not a source of income at all, actually ), and the "I very much enjoy this" part is less and less prominent every year..

Dunno, might as well decide to be less involved in this, or leave the whole game to my brother in law.. I'd hate to see all the efforts done to be wasted, but if I'm having to feel bad about that, I might as well go down the hard way..