Summer's swan song

If the sharp angle of the afternoon shadows wasn't enough to tell me summer was near its end, the combines in the corn fields clinched it.

I was heading to the farm for the 50th anniversary of the church where Mom now attends Mass, and I was surprised to see so much harvesting going on already. Some fields had already been shorn, stalks sprouting from the ground like a few days' worth of beard stubble.

Fields of milo looked ready for the reaper weeks ahead of when they typically are, bright crimson heads leaning slightly under the weight of the imminent harvest.

As my drive continued past the checkerboard of row crops, I remembered an article I read recently about the 2009 grape harvest in the Bordeaux region of France. The piece was an early assessment of the wines produced from last year's harvest, and how the weather leading up to and throughout the growing season affected the quality and flavor of the grapes.

I've always been fascinated by how a vintage can be affected by something as seemingly innocuous as a week of hot weather and cloudless skies, or a shower on just the right - or wrong - day.

Farmers in the wheat belt know all about how significant a timely shower can be for a wheat crop; or how 10 days of hot, dry weather just as the wheat heads are filling out can cripple a yield.

But vinyards are a more vulnerable tapestry, and the wines they produce are time capsules - weather-engraved snapshots of years gone by....