11069 Piemonte snow time !

Beautiful pictures!

Thank you

Just been on the website for the ski school on Mottarone [Northern Piemonte]
My holiday place is 25 minutes from the top of Mottarone, and I'm going out for New Year

They had snow on 1st December - 120cm deep.

If you go to this site - you can set up a great slide show of the resulting scenes.

[url=http://picasaweb.google.it/Mottarone/3DicembreMottarone#]Picasa Web Album - Paolo - 3 Dicembre Mo...[/url]

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We arrived back in Piedmont on Tuesday (9th) - returning from our 5 week tour of the Uk promoting our wines. After a clear run through central Switzerland, the scene changed to a much whiter andwintery theme as we emerged from the St Gothard tunnel into the Tichino. More surprisingly it didn't dissapear as we headed through Western Lombardy into Piemonte.
By the time we got up our own hill into the vineyards the scene was similar to the Alps, with the road clear but flanked by deep snow and a very white blanket everywhere. Within an hour of getting home a fresh snow storm started and withing 3 hours we were well and truly snowed in. In fact it snowed for about 18 hours non stop and put another foot of snow down. It took me about a day and a half to plough our way out with the tractor.
Although there is a thaw at the moment (here in the lowlands) there is no sign of it dissapearing entirely and certainly the mountains are going to be great for skiing this season.

How is all this early snow going to affect the vineyards? Will the grapes be any different next year because of these particular conditions? Do you prefer the snow now or later in the winter?
As you can see, I know very little of vineyards, but I think that many other members will be on the same boat....

As we enter our 5th year as growers and winemakers here in Piedmont the one thing I can say is that so far every year is different. This is the first time we have had (substantive) snow prior to Christmas, and one year we had no snow at all.
My strong belief is that snow is good, it kills off some of the ground cover weeds along with some of the insect population and generally reminds plants it is hibernation time. On a nuturing front, unlike rain, snow does not "run off" it sits in place and will gradually melt into the ground providing the clay in the vineyards with much of the moisture for the coming year.
One of the problems from 2008 was mildew from the very wet May/June and I am told that this type of infection lingers on the bark of the ceppi (the old vine base) - so I am hoping that the snow will have some purging effect for that too!

Some years ago we owned a house in the South-West of France and there were 3 or 4 old vines. It is a very wet area and I noticed that the vines were infected with some type of mildew. Not knowing what to do, I asked our neighbour who immediately came to the rescue with some type of concoction called "Bouillie Bordelaise", a product that is widely used in the Bordeaux vineyards. It left some ugly blue marks on the bark, but the mildew was gone.

[quote=Gala Placidia;105511]..."Bouillie Bordelaise", ..........[/quote]

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordeaux_mixture]Bordeaux mixture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/url]

Interstingly mildew was our "nemesys" this year - powdery mildew in fact. We use a variety of Bordeaux type mixes in the vineyards here in Piedmont. This is allowed in organic farming (the Wiki stub does not mention this I notice). It is effective against downey mildew not powdery midew. We use a dry sulphur powder (polvere) as the main defence, although there are proprietry chemicals available too.
The distinctive blue colour is indeed the copper sulphate, and can be seen especially on trellis end posts and any trees that have been allowed to grow in the vineyard.