Winter Grape Report by Erin Marie Miller
I
t takes more than ripened grapes to produce an excellent bottle
of wine, and winegrowers will often be the rst to admit it. From terroir and timing to variety and technique, the art and science of cultivating grapes and making wine requires extensive education and meticulous skills that take years to acquire and decades to perfect. Still, there is one common challenge that even the world’s most advanced grape growers can’t control: the weather. And in Michigan, where winters have been getting warmer for decades, it’s a problem that has taken center stage for researchers in recent years. “We have 65 years of data from Northwest (Michigan), and it shows the winters getting warmer and warmer within the last 30 years,” said Esmaeil Nasrollahiazar, the viticulture extension educator at Michigan State University’s Grand Traverse County Extension O ce in Traverse City, Michigan. But while uctuating temperatures might mean more challenges for the state’s winegrowers, including shifting harvest times and less predictable growing conditions, the future isn’t entirely doom and gloom for Michigan’s wine industry – especially on the heels of a cooler winter that, at press time, left MSU’s viticulturalist hopeful about the year’s harvest. Grape expectations Although it was too early to predict winter’s nal impact on Northwest Michigan’s grapes at press time in March, Nasrollahiazar said that, despite the season’s snow, ice and cooler temperatures – a switch from last winter, which was the warmest on record in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the weather had been okay for grapes so far. After a brief scare over the threat of a polar vortex forming when the East Bay area lost lake e ect in February, Nasrollahiazar seemed hopeful that, like last year, this year’s harvest might produce good fruit. “As far as we see, we didn't observe any major cold damage up here in the Traverse City area,” Nasrollahiazar said, adding that there was still a possibility of frost in the nal weeks of spring.
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16 | MICHIGAN UNCORKED