Finger Lakes freezes devastate vineyards

Wines & Vines, July, 2005 by M. David Levin

After the devastation of the Finger Lakes vineyards, Dr. Bob Pool lamented, "Where was global warming when we needed it?"

But of course, he knew. He'd had it already. An uncharacteristically warm autumn had lingered well into December 2003, following a cool, rainy and powdery mildew-infested growing season. Mel Nass, who with his wife, Phyllis, grows both wine and table grapes on the eastern side of Seneca Lake, understates that the vines "didn't set up very well for the winter" under those conditions.

So when the big freeze came along just the next month, the vines had no cold hardiness in them. "A ripple of fear went through the grapegrowers," Nass says.

Then, the double whammy: Yet another big freeze brought tears to the eyes at the same time in January of this year. That did it!

As Pool, a professor of viticulture in Cornell University's department of horticultural sciences explains, "A massive pool of cold air from our friend and neighbor, Canada, and a high pressure system to our north and slightly east meant the cold air did not move over Lake Ontario before it hit the Finger Lakes," as it usually does.

Instead, northeast winds blew in over the cold Adirondack Mountains, producing "damaging temperatures and unusual injury patterns."

For example the Nasses, who farm 57 acres of vinifera and hybrids and, being on an eastern shore, usually are buffered by the warming air flowing from over Lake Ontario, lost 10 acres of young vinifera just coming into full production. Some winegrowers had no crop at all, nor any viable vines left as, according to John Wagner, a number of vines "failed to produce any renewal growth, and therefore had to be replaced." Even secondary buds failed to deliver viable fruit.

Others, such as the small estate winery Frontenac Point Vineyards on the west shore of Cayuga Lake, suffered only normal winter damage in 2003-4, about 5%. Proprietor/winemaker Jim Doolittle says that the following winter into January of this year killed 8%, all vinifera--Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and the hardiest of the Finger Lakes viniferas, Riesling.

But, "My neighbor up the road lost all of his new Merlot. He's not thrilled about that," Doolittle says. Neither was Pool overjoyed about losses at his own Billsboro Winery, at the north end of Seneca Lake, one lake to the west of Cayuga. With two degrees in enology, he says he is as interested in winemaking as in viticulture; yet Pool lost 70% of the vines in his 5-year-old winery.

How Cold Was It?

A report entitled The Perfect? Freeze, issued by Dr. Tim Martinson, the Cornell University Cooperative Extension regional grape specialist, with Pool and Steve Lerch, Bill Wilsey and David Chicoine, all of whom work in various capacities for Cornell, shows that "temperatures below zero were frequent in 2004, but the official low temperature in Geneva on Jan. 10 of minus 15[degrees] was sufficient to kill many buds and vines. We recorded a range of temperatures from minus 16[degrees] to minus 13[degrees] in our vineyard blocks."

John Wagner, who with his father, the renowned winegrower S. Bill Wagner, farms some 220 acres of vinifera, hybrids and native varieties on the eastern shore of Seneca Lake, notes that, "We also experienced several extended periods in January 2004 where the temperature didn't climb above zero. This is an extreme rarity here in the Finger Lakes."

Finger Lakes vines normally would cope with sub-zero temperatures of short duration, especially as the region usually has copious snowfalls that blanket the vines above the grafts. But, Wagner says, "2003 got off to a late start, with a cool, wet spring that presented us with quite a bit of disease pressure early in the season. Throughout the season our growing degree-days lagged behind normal, with ripening occurring later than usual. Early and midseason varieties ripened without a problem, but late season reds did not attain great levels of ripeness even with post-veraison thinning. We let Cabernet Sauvignon hang until Nov. 8."

There was a killing freeze just before harvest, so there could be no accumulation of carbohydrate reserves afterward, then "December was particularly mild with some 50-60[degrees] (and above) temperatures," Wagner says.

Since that burned off any remaining snow cover, there was nothing to blanket the roots. Soils stayed wet after the harvest, meaning that "there was no opportunity to hill-up graft unions before snow fell."

In that regard, Dr. Thomas Henick-Kling, enologist at Cornell's Geneva, N.Y. experimental station, is emphasizing tiling vineyards which do not have sufficiently good drainage.

(Willy Frank, whose late father, Dr. Konstantin Frank, taught Finger Lakes winegrowers how to protect the vines by hilling-up, used his specialized equipment to do just that on his hillside vineyards on Keuka Lake, and says he came out OK.)

But John Wagner over on Seneca Lake says that after the January 2004 big freeze, "We experienced trunk damage in several vinifera varieties. Many of our vinifera plantings are over 25 years old, and some of these vines failed to produce any renewal growth and had to be replaced," he says.