Many of our visitors in the tasting room have asked how the vines — and other inhabitants of Shadow Run Vineyards — are holding up with all the rain and the first significant snow since the 80’s. Over the past 10 years, the annual rainfall in this part of the world has averaged about 12 inches. At the time of writing this article, we’re at 22 inches for the season, and expecting another 2 inches in the next 10 days.
On the morning of Saturday, February 25th, we woke up to a ranch blanketed with 3 to 4 inches of snow. Throughout the day we had families showing up from Paso and Atascadero to play in the snow. Apparently we were lucky in Creston, getting the most snow of the surrounding areas. There was enough snow to do some significant damage to some unlucky pine trees on the property, and it was cold enough for the snow to last throughout the weekend. We’re sure this is the first snow the winery-dog-in-training, Flynn, has seen and you can see him shooting around the vineyard in the below video:
The good news is that this is exactly the winter we needed. While Shadow Run has plenty of ground water to pump into the vineyard, without rain the salts from the ground water build up in the vineyard and eventually form a level of salinity that prevents adequate nutrients getting to the vines. Heavy rains like we’ve had this year flush the salt out of the vineyard, or drive it further down in the soil, making our job in the vineyard this summer much easier.
Likewise, the continued rains, snow, and cold drive the vines into a long and deep dormancy, giving them the rest they need for a productive Spring. We will have a very late bud break this season (we’re only pruning now, in the third full week in March). A late bud break — possibly the first week of April — puts the delicate buds out of reach of a late frost.
Lastly, and this is very much a “fingers-crossed” scenario, we expect all the late rain to give us a glorious wildflower season. We’re already seeing yellow, white, blue, purple and orange blooms in the countryside. Shadow Run is only about 6 miles west of Shell Creek Road, the most spectacular home of Central Coast wildflowers, and with any luck we’ll be dappled with flowers throughout April and into May.