If we lived in California we would be growing and making wine from Zinfandel and Chardonnay grapes rather than writing a book about new hybrid grape varieties with names like Frontenac, Troubador, and Prairie Star. We don't live in California though. We live in Minnesota where wine grape growing has been considered improbable enough to challenge breeders, growers, and winemakers to develop new varieties and methods to produce better quality wines. Twenty years ago few believed it could be done. Twenty years from now we expect to see it being done regularly. Right now growers in our area are eager to plant wine grapes where they have not been grown before.
We have been influenced heavily by our local growing and winemaking experience. Both of us have small vineyards on the northern edge of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, which many would say is well beyond the sensible range for growing wine grapes. Winter temperatures of -31 oF (-35 oC) are an annual occurrence here and temperatures of -40 oF (-40 oC) occur at least one year out of every ten. Where we live matters because the cold winters make it an ideal test area for many new grape varieties. Many grape breeders live and work in our area, including Peter Hemstad, David Macgregor, Herb Fritzke, and the world-renowned Elmer Swenson. So ironically, Minnesota is a hotbed of northern viticulture research and development activity.
Why do we not recommend growing Vitis vinifera? Some growers have pushed the boundaries of vinifera grape growing into very northern climates, including into Minnesota. With special care, some of these vinifera vines can survive the winter and produce a good crop. In an outstanding growing season, with good heat accumulation and a sufficiently long frost-free season for ripening, these vines can produce wines comparable in quality to those produced from similar varieties in California, Oregon, France, or Germany. But in typical growing seasons, vinifera wines in Minnesota and like climates are simply not up to the par established by more classic wine growing regions. The quality does not justify the extra effort and risk involved in growing them.
Consequently, we have looked for ways to optimize the harvest and wine quality of hybrid grape varieties that tend to succeed in climates where the classic Vitis vinifera varieties fail. Most, if not all of the hybrid grape varieties grown in the north have had their potential for wine quality enhanced by vinifera genes. Asian and North American native grape species have contributed genes to these hybrids that allow them to withstand cool, short seasons or cold winters, or extreme disease pressure.
In the grape growing section of this book we focus on topics of special importance to growers on the northern fringes of viticulture such as cold hardiness, site selection, variety selection, winter protection, training systems, and techniques to aid proper ripening. Our goal is to help you make the most out of your climate by making wise variety and site selection decisions and by applying the cultural techniques necessary for good fruit quality. You will not find chapters here on grapevine propagation, planting, and weed control because these subjects are already covered in our recommended texts. What you will find in this book is a significant amount of not previously presented new material.
Our winemaking section concentrates on how to make high quality wines from the hybrid varieties available in the north and ripened within the constraints of cool temperatures and short growing seasons. The challenge here is that many hybrid grape varieties that are outstanding in the northern vineyard are quite capable of producing flawed wines. The winemaking chapters describe ways to avoid or counter the flaws characteristic of these varieties.
The foundations of this book have been a long time developing. Tom has been reading about and working with plants since he was nine years old. He has planted two vineyards in Minnesota and has been breeding grapes for six years. He also has traveled widely around the northern fringes of the grape growing world learning all he can about grape culture problems, solutions, and prospects. Bob did not start making wine at nine years old, but he has been trying to push the limits of standard winemaking for the last ten years, usually by blending together different wines to compensate for the aromatic or flavor shortcomings of unblended ones. Bob's interest in winemaking caused him to plant his own vineyard. What he knew about growing things before then came from learning from his wife's gardening experience and observations while gathering wild edible plants and fruit.
In some ways our lack of knowledge in each other's specialty has helped us write this book. Tom learned what kinds of vinification problems in northern grape varieties could and could not be solved by winemaking techniques. Bob learned how sensitive vines are to proper growing and pruning methods and how it ultimately affects wine quality. We both learned that we must explain details of our specialty in terms that could be readily understood by people not immersed in the subject.
The ideas we present in this book come from our direct experience in grape growing and winemaking, from research papers, correspondence with experts around the world, and visits to vineyards and wineries in ten U.S. states and eight countries. We have synthesized the existing research literature and related it to grape growing and winemaking problems specific to extreme northern regions. We have supplemented it where necessary with our personal observations and experiences, or those of our colleagues. The product, we believe, is a practical book that tells what to do and explains why it works.
We are still in a pioneering stage of development with new northern grape varieties and winemaking techniques for them. Working with the best new hybrid grapes is still a work in progress. In another twenty years we will be able to provide definite recommendations on growing and making wine from many of those new varieties. We could have waited those twenty years to write this book. However, serious amateur and small commercial grape growers and winemakers need information now. Therefore, what you will be reading in the following chapters is the best information we can put together at the present time. We are confident that most of what we have to say is drawn from enough experience that it will hold up over time, but we look forward to gaining enough new information to publish a revised edition.
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