Local wine lovers can relax.
Frigid temperatures in January that had wineries fearing a repeat of the 2014 bud-killing disaster didn’t do as much damage as expected.
“It’s not going to be as bad as people thought earlier,” Melissa Muscedere, president of the Essex Pelee Island Coast (EPIC) group of a dozen wineries, said this week.
The plants don’t care about wind chill
There is bud damage especially to the most susceptible varieties at that time — Merlot and Syrah — but it won’t be anything like 2014 when repeated cold temperatures killed so many buds most local wineries didn’t have any grapes growing that summer.
“We’ll all have wine and we’ll all have crops so from a consumer perspective you won’t even notice,” Muscedere said.
There is damage but it will be difficult to fully assess the impact in each variety until the end of April or early May, she said. Wineries can deal with the estimated damage by pruning differently to leave more buds on the vine, she said.
By cutting open a tiny bud, vineyard managers can see if the primary or fruiting buds are green and alive or black and dead.
“What happened in 2014 was when you cut those open they were all black,” said Muscedere of the repeated cold nights in January and March of 2014. “This year that’s not the same case.”
Buds on grape vines, pictured at Viewpointe Estate Winery, are shown Thursday, January 31, 2019. Damage to grape crops during this winter’s deep freeze is not as bad as originally feared.
The main concern was Jan. 31, she said. In Windsor, the temperature dropped to -24.7 which was a Jan. 31 record according to Environment Canada which had the previous low temperature record for Jan. 31 at -20.6 in 1971.
This year the coldest stretch was limited to the end of January and the family-run Muscedere Vineyards on County Road 18 in Harrow was able to use its wind machines to push slightly warmer air towards the ground one of the cold nights.
Tom O’Brien of Cooper’s Hawk Vineyards near Harrow said he later learned the temperature dropped to -22 not -24 in the winery and the damage wasn’t as bad as expected. “I was relieved.”
He did lose so many Merlot and Syrah buds that he won’t try to grow those grapes this year. Less pruning will allow the winery to work around damage in other varieties and he’s still got Merlot and Syrah wine from past years.
“There’s still lots of bottles from previous years. In 2016 and 2017 we got bumper harvests.”
Although February brought a deep freeze to Windsor-Essex, that was mostly wind chill, O’Brien said. “The plants don’t care about wind chill.”
Brock University’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute does bud hardiness tests to give wineries an idea of damage in extreme cold depending on the timing, the temperature and the location.
For bud survival, the university’s most recent testing from Feb. 11 in Colchester estimates a 22 per cent bud survival rate for Merlot and a 16 per cent survival rate for Syrah. Bud survival rates are estimated to be higher for other kinds of grapes and these estimates can help wineries mitigate any losses by pruning differently.
There are a dozen wineries promoted through Essex Pelee Island Coast (EPIC) in the Lake Erie North Shore and Pelee Island Designated Viticultural Areas.