Exciting New Grapes at the Cold Climate Viticulture Conference

You heard it here first: growers as far north as Minnesota or Maine can finally achieve the Holy Grail of Cold Climate viticulture; growing a high-quality, cold-hard red variety that ripens fully in a short season and is disease-resistant. And the wine it yields is not only vinifera-like but a remarkable ringer for a southern Rhone blend dominated by grenache with syrah for support.
Source: www.grapes.umn.edu

“WHAT?! is this some kind of a joke?!” - I know a lot of you are asking. “I’ll believe it when I taste it,” others are saying. And I don’t blame you. Just look at what poor winemakers (and their customers!) have had to put up with for red winegrapes in cold climates: the best that can be said for foch and dechaunac is that they produce red wine and survive the winter (usually). But who cares if they’re hardy or crop well if they make lousy wine?! Some staunch defenders of these grapes (both of them) may feel defensive; they’ve worked with them for years, their wines have gotten much better, especially since they now have the fruity, high-acid frontenac to blend them with. And to be fair, there are good examples of these wines (and I’ve tasted both of them).

But it’s all about what the consumer likes to drink. Anyone who hasn’t acclimated their palates to the grapes above over years (meaning 99.99% of wine consumers), if you put most any of these wines in a blind line-up with the New World style fruit-forward, juicy, smooth tannin international varietals of syrah, merlot, Rhone blends etc., who would prefer the former over the latter? Not as many as you need to bet a profitable business on, that’s for sure.

The Minnesota Grape Growers Association and the Cold Climate Viticulture Conference

I had this epiphany with the brand new marquette grape while attending the recent Cold Climate Viticulture Conference organized by the Minnesota Grape Growers Association in Minneapolis. I was invited to speak on “beyond red and white”, meaning blush and rosé wines, and also give the post-dinner address. Sixty seconds after checking into my room there was a knock on the door, and I was presented with a gift basket of goodies including a bottle of frontenac gris from a local winery. I was looking forward to trying this new grape, along with other new hybrids that were revolutionizing cold climate viticulture, thanks to the work of the late Elmer Swenson and currently with the U. of MN’s grape breeding program under Peter Hemstead.

The problem with “first generation” cold-hardy French hybrids such as marechal foch, dechaunac and others is that while they survived the cold winters and could reliably ripen a crop in a short season, the grapes had low tannin levels and lacked the multi-dimensional level of red vinifera grapes. Wines were often tart, simple, lacking in smooth tannins, or (with dechaunac) oxidized and muddy. Naturally, trying to make a living growing and selling these grapes or wines would be a shaky proposition at best (I know a winery owner in the Finger Lakes of NY who claims she’s physically incapable of holding dechaunac in her mouth). In fact, Wollersheim, the winery most associated with foch and a pioneer in the Upper Midwest, makes the vast majority of its wine production with New York-purchased seyval blanc branded as prairie fume; add a touch of foch for color and some residual sugar and you have a lively, very successful regional blush. Notably, Wollersheim also bottles a line of vinifera varietals from Columbia Valley fruit, and while they make good foch in several styles, they’re savvy enough to build their revenue on a more commercially popular base.

New Generation Hybrids

Cornell University Extension in Geneva (in New York’s Finger Lakes region), and the University of Minnesota, have both been developing and releasing new hybrid winegrapes (Cornell has been doing so for decades) bred for disease and cold hardiness, good crop levels, and high wine quality. Hybridizing is a slow process, but since the 1960s (and especially since the turn of the century) new hybrids from both programs have improved options in both red and white wine grapes for growers in cool and cold climates.
While the Geneva hybrids have introduced successful wine grape varieties for moderately cold climates like the Finger Lakes and Missouri (such as cayuga white, chardonel, traminette and valvin muscat for white, and GR-7, corot noir and noiret for red), there had been little hope for the Upper Midwest and other cold climate areas aside from the original Swenson hybrids such as Swenson red and St. Croix as alternatives to the bland and boring foch and dechaunac.

source: www.nysaes.cornell.edu/hort/faculty/reisch/cultivars.html

The first major post-Swenson success from the U. of MN’s grape breeding program was the introduction of frontenac in 1996, A crossing of straight vitis riparia 89 and a cold-hardy French hybrid called Landot noir, frontenac was enthusiastically promoted as being cold-hardy (to -33 F), very disease-resistant, cropping well and producing small, darkly-colored berries. Growers and wineries signed on, only to find once again that what works in the vineyard can present problems in the winery. The pluses of frontenac include very dark red juice, and rich cherry aromas and flavors. While tannins are better than with foch or dechaunac, another problem is high acidity; at 24 Brix, the grapes can still have a titratable acidity of 15 g/l; twice what you’d expect from a vinifera wine at that sugar.

Naturally, high acid wines are a hard sell to a public used to soft drinks and fruity, quaffable reds from warm, sunny climates. As a result, frontenac’s best role as a dry red wine may be, ironically, in improving the foch and dechaunac it can be blended with. On the plus side, frontenac rosés and blushes I tasted at the conference put the natural acidity of the grape to best advantage, offset by bright cherry aromas and flavors, and balanced by some residual sugar. In addition, there are high hopes for ports based on frontenac, and the best examples (such as St. Croix Vineyards) which give the wine several years of oak aging in the classic style, show a wonderfully fragrant bouquet, mellow mid-palate and firm acidity in the finish, balancing the residual sugar.

The U. of MN’s grape breeding program released two other cold-hardy and high-quality white grapes in 2002 and 2003; frontenac gris, an albino mutation of one frontenac cluster bred as a stand-alone variety (and bringing frontenac’s high acid and cherry flavors to a white wine format), and la crescent, which makes a fruity yet elegant imitation of Riesling.

Finally, in 2006, a decade after the U. of MN released frontenac, came the long-anticipated release of Marquette, likely to become known as the miracle red of the north. A complex hybrid with frontenac as a cousin and the noble pinot noir as a grandparent, The grape combines high disease resistance with a good canopy growth pattern, but the key is wine quality. Contrasted with frontenac, marquette’s “high sugar and moderate acidity make it very manageable in the winery.”

Finished wine character is remarkable for any hybrid, especially one growing in a cold climate with a short season. The sample I was given to taste by U. of MN enologist Anna Katharine Mansfield was of moderately dark garnet, with classic white pepper and raspberry aromas of grenache. On the palate, it was as if I was drinking a southern Rhone blend, 70% grenache and 30% syrah, raspberry aromas and black cherry flavors with moderate but smooth tannins and a fresh, light finish. Alcohol was 14.2% (another remarkable trait), but was integrated with the fresh and spicy fruit. Most amazing, this was the first wine made from the variety in the U. of MN’s wine lab, from the ’06 vintage, and was a tank sample that saw no oak, just the naked grape. Judicious oak treatment would add even more complexity and classic character.

You read it here first.

It’s clear that frontenac has some uses as a blender, or for pink wines or ports, but will not succeed in winning consumers from “critter wines” as a solo dry table red. Corot noir and noiret are, like marquette, major improvements on the original French hybrids foch and dechaunac, but are not as cold-hardy (only down to -15 F for corot noir).

But for growers in cold climates, marquette is the Holy Grail of red winemaking realized. I hope we’ll see rapid planting of this promising new hybrid across the Upper Midwest all the way to Maine. It will have uses even in Missouri as a vinifera-like alternative to norton, or to add welcome acidity to that native grape’s chemistry. I hope the Quebecois will rejoice in recognizing their French heritage in a southern Rhone-style red wine they can grow successfully there. Meanwhile, instead of grubbing up frontenac, to paraphrase Marie Antoinette, “Let them make port.” For more details on this grape, visit www.grapes.umn.edu.

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