Posted on 11/09/2009 9:12:35 AM PST by Coleus
HAMMONTON -- Jack Tomasello has not slept well in months, not since the summer’s torrential rains swept through his sprawling Hammonton vineyard. In its wake, the rains left behind acres of grapes now cloaked in deadly fungus.
Desperate to salvage the crops, Tomasello, who runs the state’s largest winery with his brother, has risen at daybreak each morning to inspect and spray fungicide on the 70 acres of Cabernet, Riesling and Chardonnay grapes. Even so, with just a few weeks left in the harvest, the winery will most likely reap less than half of last year’s 215 tons, when weather conditions were more ideal. In years like this, he said, "we’re a little nuts to do what we’re doing."
"We’re exhausted, we’re not happy," he said, adding that because the rain also destroyed neighboring vegetable crops, he had to shoot and kill three foraging deer. "Mother Nature was not kind this year." After an unusually wet summer, wineries in New Jersey and throughout the Northeast are facing a challenging harvest as they race to reap fungus-riddled, not-quite-ripe crops ahead of the first frost.
Though this vintage won’t hit the shelves for another year or two, it is an unwelcome setback for an industry that was just starting to gain recognition following a string of top-notch harvests, experts say. For years, the state’s $30 million wine industry, which agriculture officials say is the nation’s fifth-largest by production, was better known for its other fruit wines: blueberry, raspberry, peach.
"We were on a roll. We really had been waking people up to what we can do," said Gary Pavlis, a Rutgers University small-fruit expert who has studied grape and wine quality for more than two decades. "2009 may be a nice, drinkable wine,
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
My position: Global Warming is most likely not happening. If it is happening, Humans are not the cause. If it did happen, Global Warming would, on balance, cause more good than harm. The big danger for mankind is Global Cooling which would cause a great deal of trouble. There is evidence that Global Cooling is the current trend (and, no, that's also not our fault).
Everything Al Gore says is a lie.
Too much rain = global warming
Too little rain = global warming
Too cold = global warming
Too hot = global warming
Lots of snow = global warming
Not much snow = global warming
Hurricanes = global warming
No hurricanes = global warming
Tornadoes = global warming
No tornadoes = global warming
Did I leave anything out? < /sarc >
That damn George Bush..
This, like everything else, is George W. Bush’s fault.
Ahhh, you beat me to the punch!
“New Jersey vineyards” is not a phrase one expects.
Im surprised it took four posts!
New Jersey has wine ?
That said, good luck to the grower. Sounds like he has an uphill battle ahead of him.
Iowa has wine too, but I won’t go into that.
Florida even. Stopped at a local winery and bought a bottle.
Not too bad.
Wine made from grapes repeatedly sprayed with fungicide.
Sounds yummy.
Perhaps I should just buy the fungicide and mix it with grape juice.
I had a sip of some Iowa desert wine. I had a toothache for an hour afterward.
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