One swallow doesn’t make a summer. But when it comes to beer, one summer can make for many pleasant swallows. In the golden age of craft brewers, there are more choices than ever. Like our wardrobes, we can now change our beers with the seasons, from dark to light and back.
Kevin Trayner, a home brewer from Hamilton who wrote the Beer Drinker’s Handbook, describes for me the ideal summer beer: “It should be quenching; it makes you less thirsty — except maybe for another beer.” And it should be balanced between hops and malt, not overly malty or big-bodied. Of course, it should be refreshing, with a tang, and light in alcohol, so that after outdoor exercise “you can have a couple brews and still be coherent.”
Typical summer beers are English-style pale ales, Belgian-style witbiers (white beers), and Bavarian-style hefeweizens — cloudy wheat beers with a yeast sediment. Mr. Trayner’s personal favorites are English mild and bitter beers, balanced a little more toward hops.

Good drainage, sunlight and elevation are vital when cultivating your own vines

Central New Jersey is a challenging environment to grow grapes, especially if you dream of making a   fine Cabernet Sauvignon. After all, Princeton is no Bordeaux. But if you have the space and the dedication, you can grow your own.

Site Selection
First question: Where to plant? You need good drainage, full sun and elevation — or at least a plot that isn’t in a depression that traps cold air. You don’t need particularly rich soil; some of the best European vineyards are planted in gravel. What local vineyard owners have to contend with is hard-pan, a shale layer beneath the surface soil that discourages drain-off.
When Sergio Neri of Hopewell Valley Vineyards planted his Pennington vineyard, he used heavy equipment to break up the soil to a depth of 12 feet. Since then, standing water has been no problem. You may not have an industrial-strength cultivator, but be sure you’re not planting where puddles stand after a heavy rain.

Despite a difficult, rainy summer, winemakers at New Jersey vineyards see the silver lining

Winemakers in general view the weather as a critical but temperamental part-ner, with the capacity to dazzle or dis-may. During years when warm sunny summer days alternate with nourishing moist cool evenings, and the fall is clear and dry, great things can come from the grapes which are harvested.

And then there are years like 2009. Rainy almost without letup, the summer of 2009 was the kind of year winemakers dream of... in their worst nightmares.

“We were beaten up last year as growers by Mother Nature,” says Cameron Stark, winemaker at Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes.

“It was a wet year, and what that meant was there was a lot more disease pressure, fungal disease pressure,”
says Gary Pavlis, an expert on New Jersey grapes and wine who is a professor and agricultural agent at Rutgers University.

According to Rutgers’ office of the state climatologist, between June and October in 2009 — the main grape growing, ripening and harvesting period — there was 29.04 inches of precipitation, an average of more than 5.8 inches a month. That was more than 50 percent higher than for the same period in 2008, when precipitation totaled 18.65 inches, an average of 3.73 inches a month.

Moldy grapes aside, “the biggest thing was there wasn’t enough sun because of the rain,” Mr. Pavlis says. “Before August there was not a string of three days of sun.”