Here Comes the Sun

My Summertime obsession is checking the app that allows me to see how much solar energy is being produced by the solar panels on the tasting room roof at Winderlea. In reality, it’s just for the 22 kW we installed in 2021. The original 13 kW don’t have an app. This May, the new panels produced 2.09 MWh, the most ever for the month of May. As you might imagine, this has implications for the growing season, and as it turns out, according to Greg Jones, Ph.d, our heat units accumulation is higher than it was at this time in 2015, our most recent warm year (and along with 2014 one of the 2 warmest in history). Greg is a very highly regarded climatologist and you can see his vintage report here. At the end of May we stood at 398 heat units vs. 362 in 2015. Now harvest is more than three months away and as you know, a lot can happen between now and then but this heat and sunshine has put us back on schedule and for that we are grateful. Many of us are seeing the beginnings of bloom in our vineyards and with the nice weather ahead of us, we should be finished by mid-month. Just to finish with some fun factoids, these new panels have saved 99,080 lbs of carbon over the last three years which the app calculates to approximately equivalent to planting 749 trees. More later…