Harvest prediction not good?

St. Vincent’s feast day is January 22. Traditionally, mild weather on St. Vincent’s day lead to good crops.  Unfortunately it was some degrees below zero.   


In some places, on this date a cutting can be made of from a vine and if the buds are not damaged by the freezing winter weather there is good hope for the harvest.

Hungary: Its Fine wines and Winemakers

My wife gave me the book Hungary: Its Fine wines and Winemakers, by David Copp for Christmas. It's got some really excellent depth about the history of wine production in Hungary, grape varieties, and individual growers.

It contains an interesting story about the socialist years. Due to central planning, Russia had the job of producing tractors. These tractors, designed to mechanise wheatlands, were 3.5m wide. Hungarian vineyard rows were less than 2m apart, so to mechanise them and accomodate the tractors, every other row of a vineyard had to be uprooted, to make rows 4m apart. However, since the goals of wine production at that time were focussed on quantity rather than quality, many more vines needed to be planed on lower-quality sites.  The result was the replacement of high-density planting of old vines on the best hillside sites, with low-density plantings of heavy cropping varieties on inferior low-level sites.  The book says that this was considered a successful approach in Party quarters - production quotas were maintained and there were no complaints about the quality of the wine.  Of course, I presume complaining was not recommended in those days!