The test of new wine

To speed the growth of the state’s wine-making industry, the University of Minnesota has opened a research facility to test wines made from home-grown grapes

By Cindy Green
Photos by Rolf Hagberg

There wasn’t an apple tree in sight when the first Europeans arrived in the Midwest. “Back in the 1800s, settlers believed apples couldn’t be grown in Minnesota,” says John Marshall, secretary of the Minnesota Grape Growers Association.

“But the state horticultural society and U of M began hybridizing, and today people take apples for granted.”

At the forefront of efforts to establish a wine industry in the state, Marshall takes a lesson from those early Johnny Appleseeds. “Someday,” the Lake City grower predicts, “we’ll take grape production for granted.”

The most recent step toward that future is the completion of a new University of Minnesota research winery with AURI’s help. The winery is preparing to test dozens of cold-hardy grape varieties and may help spawn a substantial wine industry in the state.

First apples, now grapes?

Unlike apples, wild riparian grapes have been growing in the Midwest for at least a millenium. “We do have a gene base,” says Robin Partch, a Stillwater, Minn. winemaker.

Nationally, there are thousands of grape varieties, but in Minnesota, only a few meet the key criteria: to taste good, produce well and survive winter. Popular wine grapes such as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir do grow here, but they must be taken down from trellises in the fall and buried to protect them over winter. “Many growers get burned out after a few years,” Marshall says. “The work is too hard, so the growth of the industry has been slow.”

For over a century, private and university viticulturists have been crossing native grapes with traditional breeds, particularly French varieties, to produce hybrids for the Upper Midwest. For example, in the beginning of the 20th century, the University of Minnesota bred the Bluebell grape, a table grape with better flavor than New York’s Concord, according to Marshall. He propagated one of the few remaining Bluebell vines at his father’s St. Paul farm in the 1970s and eventually brought it to his own seven-acre vineyard near Lake City, Minn.

Recent University varieties are better suited for wine, such as Frontenac and Edelweiss, a variety developed by Wisconsin farmer and self-taught viticulturist Elmer Swenson (see accompanying story on page 8).

Attract the tourists

With more and better varieties, “we’re going to see an important new industry in Minnesota,” says Marshall who, with his wife Barb, presses, bottles and retails juice direct from the vineyard. Currently, only the Marshalls and one other Minnesota producer make a living solely from grape production. However, there are 25 part-time growers and 100 acres of commercial vineyards in the state, along with grape wineries in Hastings, New Ulm, Stillwater, Alexandria, Princeton and Chisago City.

Grapes like sandy soils and will grow on marginal land along river valleys such as the St. Croix, Mississippi and Minnesota. With one-time start-up costs of $4,000 to $5,000 per acre, a vineyard can bear impressive revenues — $4,000 or more per acre annually.

Vineyards also attract the curious. When the Minnesota Grape Growers Association did an economic impact study on the wine industry, “We found that Oregon’s Willamette Valley, before the 1970s (when the state’s grape production took off) was a prosperous agricultural economy, but had no tourism.” Today, Oregon has over 60 wineries and “a whole corollary tourism industry has grown up because of the wineries and vineyards — exactly the same thing will happen in the Minnesota, Mississippi and St. Croix River Valleys,”
Marshall says.

Cultivate the barbarians

Overall, Minnesota’s wine consumption “is abysmally low, and if you believe wine is good for your health, dangerously low,” Marshall chuckles. “Minnesotans drink less than a gallon and a half per capita … They drink wine in California and New York and France because there are wineries there and it brings an appreciation. In my view, as the wine industry develops here, more wine will be drunk.”

To back his claims, Marshall traces back to when Romans conquered German territories. “When the Romans reached the end of their frontier, they planted vineyards and the people in that area learned to drink wine. Barbarians further north drank beer, and to this day that line exists between beer drinkers in the north and wine drinkers in the south.”

Convinced of a grape industry’s potential, the Minnesota Legislature appropriated research funds for the University of Minnesota in 1982. Peter Hemstad was hired as a grape breeder to work with Jim Luby, head of U of M fruit breeding. They had limited resources, “working in a little basement room … on grape breeding more than wine making,” Luby says. The U of M released three grapes suitable for wines, including Frontenac, which makes a dry red wine similar to Pinot Noir.

With the new research facility expected to be operating by summer, the University will be able to test over 100 batches of wine per year rather than the dozen or so it handled previously.

Call for an enologist

The Legislature also appropriated funds for a full-time enologist (winemaker) and the University is conducting an international search. However, with “virtually every state in the union developing a wine industry,” Marshall says “enologists can go into private winemaking at a very good salary — it has to be somebody interested in research and not so interested in making a lot of money.”

Beside grapes, the enologist will test wine from other fruits, benefiting companies such as Minnesota Wild, which produces honey and wild berry wines in McGregor, or Scenic Valley Winery in Lanesboro, which makes fruit wines.

“For the wine industry to succeed, quality has to be consistently good,” Luby says. “When people taste a Minnesota wine, we want them to have a good experience and come back. This facility will help us reach that level of quality.”

“I think there are very few prejudices in the Midwest,” Marshall adds. “If people like it, they will drink it.”

The public is invited to tour the new U of M wine research facility and vineyards at an open house on August 26, 10 a.m. to noon, at the Horticultural Research Center in Victoria, Minn.