Albemarle Terroir

  The Ashenfelter paper shows that winter precipitation is an important guage of vintage quality.   A nice, wet winter prepares the soil to ensure the grape vines have just the right amount of water during the long, dry summers.   The chart below shows the winter of 2010/2011 accumulated precipitation totals for both Albemarle County and [...]

You’ve probably been wondering how the Albemarle Wine climate has been progressing in 2010.  The short summary is HOT!   The graph below provides both: 1) A comparison of Albemarle County 2010 daily average temperatures (green line) and average temperatures (purple line)  since May 1, and 2) A comparison of Albemarle County 2010 growing degree [...]

  I’ve seen  a few news stories about the excellent 2009 Bordeax vintage.   I went back through my blog to see what I had written and realized that I never did a complete 2009 Bordeaux climate review.     The WSJ article referenced above says “This year was no different. No sooner had I arrived at Bordeaux’s Gare [...]

I’ve recently discussed several interesting weather/climate and wine related issues. In particular, a recent compared the daily maximum and minimum temperature climate of Napa Valley, Bordeaux, and Albemarle county. As discussed in a recent Charlottesville Daily Progress article, one of the major differences of growing wine in Albemarle County and surrounding regions is the effect [...]

Albemarle Terroir is supposed to focus on the terroir of Albemarle County and Charlottesville, VA in an effort to discuss what makes Albemarle Wine unique. The Blog is a platform for me to learn more about the effects of climate on wine and is a great excuse to dive into some climate data. I’ve discussed [...]

I recently created a simple wine quality index to compare the vintage notes of the Chateau Montelena to daily weather records from St. Helena, CA.       In the post,  I used the variables of primary importance from Ashenfelter et al. 1995.  Since I did not have market pricing data to estimate the value [...]

The New Zealand Winegrowers have announced the statistics and outlook on quality on the 2009 vintage recently and they are quite positive. As can be expected, weather is believed to have an influence. To quote a quote from the article: “We enjoyed a very good growing season this year. Some early humidity and weather pressure [...]

I came across an interesting page at the web site of the Chateau Montelena, located in Calistoga, CA.   Thier Vintage Summary page discusses the weather and climate conditions of each vintage year and provides a few notes regarding each vintage.    Clearly I had to find some weather data and apply a bit of [...]

A quick update to follow up on my suggestion that the weather station at Bordeaux-Merignac airport moved sometime in 1987 or 1988.  For a quick analysis I accessed GSOD  data from a nearby weather station at the Cazuax, France airport.    Cazaux is approximately 15 miles to the southwest of Bordeaux, close to the Atlantic [...]

Assume the data is wrong. Observing the weather is complicated stuff and while a spreadsheet might contain data, you usually have to be very careful to ensure it’s correct.