RIO RICO, AZ — A lack of cold hours in Mexican grape producing areas will reduce the volume this spring, in the view of Paul Bachelier, who handles marketing sales and service at Daily Fresh Distributing, Inc., based here.

Bachelier said the quality of the Mexican grape crop “should be good. The weather has been very nice this year.” The Mexican grape harvest is early this spring, providing U.S. retailers with promotable volumes for the Memorial Day holiday. He said the first Mexican grape harvest in 2013 was in the range of May 1-3. This year, he said, “I’m sure it will be as early as the last week of April. My feeling is that the grape industry in Nogales will be eight to 12 days ahead of last year. That helps sell a great amount of grapes during the Memorial Day pull.”

In the Rio Rico office of Daily Fresh Distributing, Inc. are the staffers John Uribe, sales, Gloria Arreola, office manager, and Paul Bachelier, who handles marketing sales and service.Another factor favoring a Memorial Day Mexican grape promotion may be the drought conditions in California’s stone fruit production areas. “Will there be stone fruit for Memorial Day? What will happen? That makes Mexican grapes all the more important and they’re going to be an item that people will go after to promote.”

Bachelier said some Mexican vineyards did receive adequate cold hours this year. But most did not. Less than ideal cold hours will drop Mexican white grape production by 30 to 40 percent and red grape production will be down 20 to 30 percent, Bachelier indicated.

He said the reduced production is partially the responsibility of growers in some areas who prematurely applied hydrogen cyanamide, a chemical application to encourage early production, before the growers would know how many hours of chilly weather the Mexican vineyards would experience. In the wrong circumstances this process can cause some grape bunches to abort or have reduced berry size.

Overall, an average grape berry size this year should be 11/16ths to 12/16ths of an inch, he said. Last year, the average was in the 12/13ths to 13/16ths range. This is among the reasons the total 2014 Mexican grape volume is expected to be down.

Bachelier said March 28 that a wild card in the coming grape deal is young vineyards coming into production maturity. He wonders: Will the added production potential make up for lost production from older vineyards? Or will the new production also be struck by a lack of cold hours, thus making those vines a minor contributor to Mexico’s grape volume in the spring of 2014?

Daily Fresh Distributing will market between 250,000 and 300,000 boxes of Mexican grapes this spring. Seventy percent of the volume will be white grapes and the remainder will be Flames.

“We will start May 1 and wrap up June 15,” Bachelier said.