A long, cold night in Martinborough – the first frost greets us
What a doozy!!!
As usual the first frost of this season was not as forecasted or as planned to unravel, this frost had total control over the Martinborough town ship and outer edges in its grasp! Estimated by the frost expert (??) this frost was due to show it’s ugly side at 3am but as we all were settling down to sleep at a reasonable hour of 9pm the cell phone echoed its tune beside the bed to say, hey it’s time to get to work and fight the present and building frost.
Wind mills were already in full swing all over town and as time went on more and more fired up as well as two helicopters that did there circuits of the vineyards they were patrolling.
Blair, Kyle and I had around 2 hours to circulate our vineyards getting a bearing on what the temperature were going to do. At 11pm we felt our first ice on the irrigation and put Collins water on followed by Om Santi wind mill then off to Clouston to fire up the water system there. It was not until 3.30am that we put Wharekauhau’s two wind mills on with the temperature there dropping quite low to -1.5. By 04.30 the frosts presence was well felt with lows of -2.3 in certain areas of Clouston Sav where the buds have not yet moved.
As the sun rose the temperature stayed stable around the -1 to 0 deg for there was a slight breeze that had picked up and saved the temperature from plummeting. All the wind mills and water systems ran very well and made the fight that much easier to control.
