Wine-grape production discussed at the Farm Science Review

By Kevin Dye

kdye@madison-press.com

In the last four years, Ohio has seen the amount of winer­ies grow from 124 in 2008 to 171 in 2012.

That has cre­ated a short­age of wine grapes avail­able and has opened up oppor­tu­ni­ties for those inter­ested in wine-grape production.

Ohio State Uni­ver­sity exten­sion spe­cial­ist and asso­ciate pro­fes­sor Dr. Gary Gao said that wine-grape pro­duc­tion can be a good way of diver­si­fy­ing farm­ing oper­a­tions. Gao pre­sented the Wine Grape Pro­duc­tion pro­gram at the Cen­ter For Small Farms at the Farm Sci­ence Review on Wednes­day. Gao said that Ohio winer­ies are more than eager to find Ohio grapes for sale.

“We saw a trend that a num­ber of winer­ies in Ohio kept going up and up and now we have 171 winer­ies in the state,” Dr. Gao said. “Most Ohio winer­ies are look­ing for locally grown grapes for their wine production.”

Ohio State Uni­ver­sity exten­sion spe­cial­ist and asso­ciate pro­fes­sor Dr. Gary Gao explains the impor­tance of site selec­tion when it comes to set­ting up and estab­lish­ing your own vine­yard dur­ing the Wine Grape Pro­duc­tion pro­gram at the Farm Sci­ence Review on Wednesday.

Gao sited the most impor­tant fac­tors to con­sider when start­ing a new vine­yard are the site selec­tion and the type of grapes to grow.

Things to con­sider when select­ing your site for your vine­yard are the cli­mate, win­ter tem­per­a­tures and spring frosts, the topog­ra­phy and the type of soil and its drainage.

“You need to know your cli­mate and know your soil before you select grapes,” Dr. Gao said. “Most soil in Ohio does not drain well and grapes need very good drainage.”

He rec­om­mends a tile drainage sys­tem for the soil for the grapes, but admits that it can be costly. “Soil drainage is more than just the slope, which is only sur­face drainage,” Dr. Gao said. “Grapes need good depth drainage to be suc­cess­ful. Drainage tile is the best solu­tion, but the cost is very high.”

To start a new vine­yard, Gao sug­gests that you start with one to five acres of land. You should check your aver­age win­ter tem­per­a­tures and the tim­ing of spring frosts. That infor­ma­tion will help in the selec­tion of grapes for your vine­yard. The selec­tion of grapes for your vine­yard is very impor­tant to your suc­cess in start­ing a vine­yard. You need to strike a bal­ance between grapes that can grow in your tem­per­a­ture range and loca­tion and still be grapes of high qual­ity to a wine producer.

There are three types of grapes that will suc­ceed in Ohio. Native grapes like Con­cords and Catawba can eas­ily grow in Ohio, but they are more suited to grape juice and jams and jel­lies. French-American hybrids are usu­ally cold-hearty grapes that work well in Ohio vine­yards. The Venifera grapes are a pre­mium qual­ity wine grape with a Euro­pean ori­gin. The down­side to these grapes is that they are not very cold-hearty for most of Ohio and will suf­fer dam­age below –10 degrees.

“It is worth the risk to try and use Venifera grapes if you can, due to the higher qual­ity grape which yields higher costs,” Dr. Gao said.

Gao said that there are also new French-American hybrids like Noiret, Regent and Traminette that have been intro­duced recently and that Traminette looks par­tic­u­larly promis­ing as the grapes have a high demand and bring in a high yield.

When you have decided on the type of grapes to plant, Gao said that it is impor­tant to pur­chase your virus-indexed plants from a rep­utable nurs­ery. He said you can prop­a­gate your own, but you must make sure to fol­low plant patent laws.

There are chal­lenges to wine grape pro­duc­tion such as weather con­di­tions, fun­gal dis­eases, birds and wildlife, weeds, labor costs and the high cost of labor. Gao said that the typ­i­cal vine­yard start-up usu­ally takes three years before the crop really gets going and by the fourth year grow­ers can expect a full crop of grapes. The typ­i­cal farm that decides to grow wine grapes, do so as a side income and there­fore can wait for the vine­yard to estab­lish itself. An indi­vid­ual would need sev­eral acres to make grapes a full-time pay­ing crop.

Dr. Gao said that fungi­cides are very impor­tant for the suc­cess of your vine­yard and he highly rec­om­mends using a prod­uct like Man­cozeb to con­trol fun­gus dis­eases through­out the grow­ing process.

Still, wine mak­ers are very eager to buy wine grapes from local grow­ers, because the grown grapes are easy for them to turn around for a profit as a high qual­ity wine.

“There is some money to be made on the vine­yard side,” Dr. Gao said. “But, there is much more money to be made on the win­ery side.”

Posted by Rob Treynor on Oct 1 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.