By Ryan C. Christiansen
there’s a new high-value crop growing on area farms. No, it’s not corn. A high-value crop is generally a non-staple crop, such as a vegetable, fruit, or flower, and it gives a higher net return per acre of land than more widely grown crops. The new high-value crop in the area is wine grapes, and the crop is changing not only the face of wine-making in this part of the country, but it’s changing the face of tourism, as well.
Grapes aren’t new to this area. The earliest settlers made juice and jellies out of wild, native varieties, but those grapes aren’t good for wine because you have to add so much sugar during the fermentation process. No, if you’re going to have a vineyard, you need cold hardy grapes with high sugar content.
Most of the grapes being grown in this area are cultivars propagated by the University Minnesota, including the featured varieties Frontenac, La Crescent, and Marquette (named after French explorers and place names in Minnesota), and also Valiant, a cultivar propagated by South Dakota State University.
North Dakota State University has gotten into propagating cultivars, too, and is currently evaluating which varieties might be most suitable for North Dakota vineyards, especially for farmers north of Interstate 94 where grapevines must endure colder average winter temperatures, and where in summer, they must thrive with less heat from the sun.
In 2009, the North Dakota Legislature established the North Dakota Grape and Wine Program Committee to oversee $250,000 in grants for grape and wine research, as well as education and marketing in the state. In addition, the $2.5 million Northern Grapes Project, funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crop Research Initiative (SCRI), will help a team of researchers from 12 universities, including NDSU, SDSU, and the U of M, to bring cold hardy grapes to a wider market.
Grapes are a high-value crop because a substantial volume of the fruit can be grown on a small number of acres. According to the North Dakota Grape Growers Association, one acre of land can handle 400 to 500 plants, and after five years, the vines can produce 10 to 15 pounds of grapes (or three to five bottles of wine) apiece, producing in total 2 to 3.75 tons of grapes per acre, which equates to 1,200 to 2,500 bottles of wine from that single acre. Up-front costs for installing a vineyard are $5,500 to $7,000 per acre, and the life of a vineyard is 50 years or more. The NDGGA says a one-acre vineyard requires only five hours of labor per week to maintain across the 22-week season. At $.50 cents to $.75 cents per pound for grapes sold to a winery, a crop of wine grapes might yield $2,000 to $4,500 per acre.
Of course, there are risks, and getting the most value out of growing grapes requires additional work. Grapes are perishable and so they can’t be stored for long, and the farmer needs to be making money somehow while waiting five years for the vines to begin producing commercially viable amounts of fruit for harvest. To get the most out of growing grapes, a vineyard should also be a winery, which can increase the yield to $13,500 to $30,375 per acre, depending on whether the winery is selling to retail outlets or direct to customers.
According to the NDGGA, the state now has more than 40 vineyards, including 15 commercial vineyards, and nine licensed wineries. Meanwhile, more than one million gallons of wine are shipped into North Dakota each year by outside distributors, and so there is a lot of room for local vineyards and wineries to help satisfy the local consumption of wine.
On the Minnesota side, the Minnesota Grape Growers Association is 30 years ahead of its North Dakota counterpart. The Minnesota association started in 1976, and in 1978, the U of M began collaborating with Elmer Swenson, a Wisconsin grape breeder, to develop cold hardy grapes. The first varieties were Swenson Red and Edelweiss. In 1996, Frontenac, the U of M’s first truly cold hardy red wine variety, hit the market, followed by the white wine variety LaCrescent in 2002, the Frontenac Gris white wine variety in 2003, and the Marquette red wine variety in 2006. The state now has more than 632 grape growers and around 40 wineries. Those wineries produced over 93,000 gallons of wine in 2009, and Minnesota’s wineries are projected to produce more than $11 million of wine by 2014.
Five years ago, Michael Bullock and his business partner, Penny Aguirre, planted vines and opened Richwood Winery on a southeastern-facing slope along the shores of Buffalo Lake near Callaway, Minn. But it didn’t take much to convince Bullock and Aguirre to take the plunge. That’s because Aguirre is the owner of Biological Patent Services in New Hope, Minn., “and she writes the patents for the University of Minnesota,” said Bullock, the winemaker in the partnership. “She did the patent for the Marquette grape,” he said, “and we knew the professor. We tasted the wine and said, ‘Wow, this is really good.’ At first we were just goofing around about starting a vineyard and winery, but then I found this cute little property near a lake…”
And the rest is history.
Bullock said the Richwood Winery vineyard has Marquette, LaCrescent, and Frontenac Gris vines, all U of M varieties. “It’s not like you can plant just any kind of grape here,” he said. Bullock said he has tasted wine made from some of the older regional varieties, such as Edelweiss, “but those grapes aren’t as good as the new ones,” he said, “because you end up putting in too much sugar. These new grapes, they just work. You smash them, throw in yeast, and make wine.”
Having planted five years ago, Bullock said he’s just getting his first full crop of grapes this year. Those five years included one spring with a really bad frost, he said, “which knocked everything back to the root, and it slowed me down, but it looks really good this year.”
Bullock said he doesn’t have plans to plant any more vines “because I’m mostly a winemaker,” he said, “and I like to leave the farming to the farmers.” Bullock said he buys most of his grapes from a vineyard near Wheaton, Minn., where the farmer also grows the U of M varieties.
In 2009, Greg Stomp of Stomp’n Grapes Vineyard near Cooperstown, N.D., got into growing grapes because “we had a couple of extra acres,” he said, “and I wanted to do something with them instead of just mow them.” He said he looked at finding a high-value crop that could generate some income on a smaller piece of land, “and I decided to give grapes a try,” he said, “because it’s kind of a new, burgeoning market.” He planted 60 vines his first year, he said, and has since planted another 260. “It’s kind of a learning process as I go along,” he said, “and I have to learn on the fly, but the nice thing about the North Dakota Grape Growers is that we’re all kind of learning and we learn together. The grapes are hearty enough that they’re doing well in spite of me. I can screw up on them and they will let me know, but they will come back. I decided to let them grow and to not get in their way.”
Stomp said he has approximately 200 vines of Marquette in the vineyard and the rest are Frontenac, Clinton, and Valiant varieties. He said he chose to grow Marquette because, “from everything I could read,” he said, “this newest grape variety will produce a better quality wine. It’s the one that’s on the horizon, because it takes three or four years before you can make wine out of it to see if it’s any good.”
Last year was the first year Stomp began getting clusters of grapes on his Marquette vines, he said, “and this year they’re clustering up really nice. Last year I was just glad to see grapes after three years of pruning them.”
Stomp said he hopes to open a small winery someday and to sell bottles locally. “And I hope some existing wineries will just buy the grapes, too,” he said, “and that other people in the area might buy some grapes to make their own wine. They make great jelly, too.”