FILL5835_Dave Schreiner Winter Hardy Grapes Transcript

[APPLAUSE]

- Okay, good evening guys. As mentioned, my name is Dave Schreiner. I'm with the UW-Madison Department of Plant Pathology and I'm going to talk to you guys tonight a little bit about viticulture and wine making here in the Midwest. So I always like to start out with these pictures because when most people think about growing grapes and making wine, they think about California and sun and beautiful days. And unfortunately, the reality is that we live here in the Midwest. And the Midwest is cold. 

Wisconsin is cold. It's cold for a long time and the temperatures are intense, as we've experienced, much to our chagrin in recent years. So this creates what I like to call the Midwestern grape dilemma and that is that traditionally the best wines, the ones that you and I have traditionally enjoyed are made from vitis vinifera which is the European wine grape. And so your Rieslings, your cabernets, those are made from vitis vinifera and that is European of descent. 

However, vitis vinifera, unfortunately, is not actually cold hardy here in 99.9 percent of the Midwest. Conversely, as I think was mentioned earlier, we do have cold hardy cultivars that are vitis vinifera, which is the European grape, and American grape crosses which is all well and good, however, they just don't always make the best wine. In fact nine times out of ten they make inferior wine to the wines that we're accustomed to drinking as consumers. 

So this leaves us as viticulturists and wine makers in the state with a very, very significant challenge. And in summary, the challenge here is to successfully grow high quality, wine grade fruit on cold hardy grape hybrids, so not the European viniferan varieties. And then to successfully create and market new varietal wines to the public and ultimately, hopefully to compete with traditional wine industries in California and Australia and, yeah, Europe, too. 

So there are significant challenges to viticulture here in the Midwest. One of the most significant ones, the one that I will be hitting on the most tonight is cold winter temperature, as I mentioned. That means vine loss. That's loss in yield and loss in money. So most of the European wine grapes don't make it and even many of our hybrids can't make it here, so that's an issue. 

Additionally, newer hybrid cultivars, I like to say less traveled by because we just have not grown them for that long so there's a lot that we don't know about poundage and yield and disease, may things that European growers who have grown these grapes for hundreds of years, they have a significant advantage in the fact that they know these things. A lot of the time here in the state, we just don't. And lastly I think, perhaps most significantly, marketing. 

It's very hard to sell fruit to people if they don't know what the fruit is. People like what they know and a lot of these grapes are new, therefore hard to market. So I have this graph here. It's from the Northern Grapes Project which is basically a collection of data from northern, so Midwestern vineyards. Here you can see 342 vineyards surveyed here, less than 20 percent established prior to 2002. Incredible, right? So that leaves a whopping 80 percent established in the last 15 to 20 years. 

So in terms of the cold hardiness, how are we getting around this issue? Well, I think there, the most significant player in this game is the University of Minnesota's Grape Breeding Program. And Minnesota has an excellent program that mix crosses between the European wine grapes that I mentioned, those vitis vinifera, remember, and two different Native American grapes, vitis labrusca and vitis riparia which I'll really touch on in a little bit. 

So the result is that we now have many options down to negative 40. Another contributor that is worth mentioning is a man by the name of Elmer Swenson. He was actually a Wisconsin man. I like to mention him. He was up in Osceola, Wisconsin. He bred grapes initially on a recreational scale but later, much more professionally for many, many years. 

And a lot of his varieties are still out there being grown and I think most importantly are being used as parents for a lot of the crosses that are being made right now to get newer, better, improved grapes. So here is a map just kind of showing where the native grape genes came from. Now the labruscan grape is the Concord grape. That's one that we're very accustomed to hearing about. Traditionally it's seen as having come from the Northeastern United States. 

Vitis riparia is not relegated to just that circle I have there in red, but the genes that the University of Minnesota is using certainly did come from that region. So those are the two regions of diversity for most of these genes that were crossing into the European line grapes. So the result now is that we do have some pretty excellent cultivars from the University of Minnesota. 

I mention these four because these are probably the most widely grown; statistically they certainly are and I think that in the future they are going to continue to be the most widely grown ultimately crowding out a lot of the more traditional ones. And they are La Crescent, Frontenac, Frontenac Gris, Marquette. Two whites, La Crescent and Gris are both used to make whites. Marquette and Frontenac are both used to make reds. 

Also worth noting, some Swenson varieties, now I said that they are a little bit less common, however if you do find a varietal wine made from any of these grapes that are Swensons, it's probably going to be one of these four. They're still out there. St. Pepin, La Crosse, Edelweiss and Brianna. A couple were co-released with the University of Minnesota but they are originally Swenson grapes. So that's a brief spin over the viticultural industry here in the state in the Midwest. 

Now I'd like to get into a little bit of a discussion on the wines here. And here are four images of varietal wines made from grapes right here in the state. Now there are also challenges with wine making in the Midwest and again, I'm going to hit on this, wine quality and cold hardiness are not the same thing. Unfortunately grapes that grow here are a dime a dozen. Grapes that make good wine, not so much. 

Acid management, unfortunately, cool summers here mean, in most fruit, grapes included that acid levels tend to be much higher in the fruit produced here as opposed to other regions of the country; additionally low sugar. So in an ideal grape, traditionally you would want high sugar and low acid. Unfortunately in most of the fruit produced here, you get low sugar, high acid so chemically this grape juice is actually flip flopped from what a wine maker has traditionally wanted to see. 

Additionally marketing. Marketing these wines can be a real challenge because people do not recognize them. Similar to how people buy fruit, people buy wines that they like. Someone goes to the store and they want a Riesling and they are going to get a Riesling and they are going to leave. There is nothing else that they are going to buy. So cultivar selection. You can't always have everything and I like to say that's why there's no pinot noir, that's my personal favorite. 

I also have two pictures here, a very common misconception grapes, you could say, Concord is on the top. Many people can grow Concords here. They think that means they'll make great wine. Wrong. Unfortunately a lot of homemade wines from Concords just don't turn out well commercially; not significant at all. Second grape there pictured is called King of the North. This is one that was actually originated from around here, actually I think originally from the Greenbush neighborhood in Madison. 

This is another backyard grape that a lot of people have. Also, not a great wine grape. So as a winemaker, you kind of have to find this neat balance between finding a grape that does survive and also that grape that just has that perfect spot; that high sugar, that low acid, those other chemical profiles. 

In terms of the actual process of making wine here, there are several strategies that are being employed now, I think, in increasing effectiveness to combat these chemical differences in the grape juice. So if you'll remember that high acid, that low sugar. One of the significant ones is called malolactic fermentation. 

I won't go into too much depth here, but suffice it to say that malolactic fermentation is using a strain of bacteria that uses up acid in its metabolic processes, which means that your final product is going to have lower acid. This is added after the initial ferment is over so you add your yeast, ferment, add your malolactic, let that go. 

Secondly, acid reducing strands of yeast; there's a lot of work being done on this right now, but many yeast strains being released right now also have the capability as they ferment to lower or knock down a little bit of that acid also giving you a bit of an edge later on. Thirdly a technique called back-sweetening: back-sweeting is a method employed by a lot of wineries here and also elsewhere. 

And this means that they add a small amount of sugar or sweetener after the ferment is completely over directly before bottling. So this doesn't actually eliminate the acid in the wine, however, when you drink a sweeter wine, you're perception is that it is less acidic. So if your wine is a little bit too far on the acid spectrum, you can often combat that by a little bit of back-sweetening. 

Most often all three of these techniques are used at the same time to produce a wine at the end that is palatable. And finally, and I think most significantly, just that continued selection for that better grape, that better grape, that better grape. And every few years the university gives us one that is just a hair better. And finally wine making and the marketing. I like to call this beating the wine snobs. 

So most people out there will tell you that they know a lot about what kind of wine they like. In fact, numerous surveys have shown that people have very specific opinions about their favorite wine. "Oh, I only drink Malbecs." However, when you give them the blind taste test, most people, actually the vast majority, will say they like other wines and in fact maybe don't even like the wine that they said they only liked. Or they'll rate other wines as better. 

So the truth of the matter here is that a lot of people will actually drink and enjoy these wines but they're not willing to give them that initial try. So what a lot of wineries right now are trying to do is expand products, get people in the doors, get people just tasting some of these wines in an effort to just get them to try. On the bottom right there is a picture of the Door Peninsula Wineries tasting room. 

Door Peninsula Winery is one winery that's doing an excellent job right now of making really easy to drink varietal wine, like raspberry wine or apricot wine, something that seems very drinkable to people, drawing them in the doors and then getting them to try, have you tried a Marquette? Have you tried a Brianna? Have you tried La Crosse? And ultimately the goal here is that a consumer walks into a store and says, hey, do you guys have a Midwestern grown Marquette? I'd like to buy a Marquette. 

And that is coming fairly soon. There are already wineries that are making these wines, that are selling these wines labeled as Marquettes or Frontenacs or Frontenac Gris. So going forward I think if there's one thing to take away here is that this is a new industry and it has all of the flaws and also all of the exciting components of a very new industry. However, they are the fastest growing fruit crop in the state right now and the Midwest and I do not think that they are going anywhere. 

This is something that we will be hearing about again and even further forward. Right at the end here I'd like to leave you with a few thoughts about the wine industry in the future. So we all know about the drought in California. I think that's something that people are very aware of. 

Additionally there are shifting climatic patterns in France that's making production of a lot of wines more challenging; for instance champagne is under attack right now because the region it's always been grown in is changing. Australia is also drying out. So that said, what about the Midwest? We have fertile soil, we have ample water, we have fairly, fairly predictable seasonality in the summer. 

So I think what I leave you with here is just to think about the fact that as these other regions of the world perhaps become unsuitable because of climatic shift, I think in addition to all the other reasons the Midwest industry is on the rise, in the next 20, 40, 60 years, these could be additional reasons that our industry here becomes more important. And with that I'd like to open it up for some questions. 

[APPLAUSE]