Harvest moon

Winemaker Lee Baker extracts red wine from a barrel with a wine thief in the cellar at Keint-He winery.

Taking a look at this year’s grape yield in the County

Harvest is an incredibly busy time for wineries in the County, and it’s particularly stressful if you’re the winemaker. The last few days, hours and minutes of being on the vines could mean the difference between a stellar vintage and a complete miss when you’re harvesting wine in this region. Here in the County at harvest time, winemakers are still desperately trying to balance sugars and acids to their liking, watching the thermometer for frost and attempting to deal with the ever-changing weather patterns that have made this area unpredictable to say the least. The County, just in the last few years, has seen a drought, a flood, and a frost that all severely affected the wine crops that season.

With nearly all the grapes off the vines, The Times decided to check in with three local winemakers and see how the harvest is going. All three winemakers have plenty in common and share a mutual respect for each other’s work. Their properties and their businesses, however, are vastly different and offer three important and unique perspectives on what it was like to grow grapes in the County this season.

There is no one person, aside from her mother, who knows the vines at The Grange Winery better than Maggie Granger-Belcastro. She grew up on the property and knows every nook and cranny. When Granger-Belcastro was younger, she would bring friends down to the barrelchamber room and attempt to scare them with creepy sounds and low light tricks. Many fond memories hang around the property. She also remembers helping with the farm and the winery wherever and whenever possible throughout her adolescence, and through that a career- path became clear for her. She would follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a winemaker. It’s a title that suits her naturally, as she easily explains the complexities of winemaking in the climate and threading the needle every year when it comes to harvesting.

This years harvest at The Grange will not be as plentiful as years past due to a few mitigating factors. The first being that having less of a crop is not necessarily a bad thing. To properly explain why, you must go back to last season and start with what a long, cold winter it was. November last year had record lows and the temperatures were reaching down to minus 20 very early in the season. This cold snap was a big issue when it came to burying the vines and keeping them healthy for next season.

“Vines need time to get to their maximum dormancy, so each week after harvest the vines are pulling more carbohydrates into their roots and focusing more on winterizing and becoming coldhardy. Each week that passes, the vines become cold-hardy to a lower temperature until they reach their maximum cold-hardiness of around minus twenty-eight degrees celsius, usually in December,” says Granger-Belcastro.

Maggie Granger-Belcastro in the cellar at The Grange Winery.

The extreme temperatures in November meant that the ground had become too hard to properly bury some of the vines. Attempts were made to rebury vines on winter days when the mercury rose above zero, but the damage had already been done. Then, a few months later the vines were unburied late because of an unusually cold April. One that carried with it a pretty significant snowstorm that ended up closing the winery for two days. When the vines eventually became unburied, Granger- Belcastro got them up and saw that there was some damage, which immediately meant a lower, or modest crop would be the scenario for 2018.

The growing season went quite well though, and May through July were pretty much ideal. For August and parts of September, however, the County was swimming in humidity, which is not good for growing grapes. Heat is good. Humidity is bad. For winemakers, humidity can be just as dangerous as rain for long periods of time in that the moisture creates mildew on the grapes.

This was also the first year that the winery can be considered organic. It’s something that Granger-Belcastro and her mother, Caroline Granger, have been striving toward for years. Although the designation is fantastic, the restrictions on what you can use on your grapes to protect them is incredibly rigid. It is thought that some grapes at The Grange this season may have suffered because of their new organic designation, but that is all sacrificed for the greater good.

Down the road and around the bend from The Grange is Trail Estate Winery, and although the two wineries are relatively close in proximity, they had very different harvest experiences. The winemaker at Trail Estate is Mackenzie Brisbois and she is no stranger to the County, having worked as the assistant winemaker and vineyard manager at Norm Hardie for five years before finding her home at Trail Estate. This upcoming vintage will be her fourth with the winery. This year was a quick and intense harvest for Brisbois and her team. It was so hot towards the end of the summer that all the grapes were ready to be picked at the same time. It was a monumental effort to coordinate the volunteers and family in such a short timeframe, but Brisbois had it under control and got all the fruit off the vines ahead of schedule. She’s almost on her way to being fully “tied down”, which means that all the vines are close to being buried for the season. Brisbois will now switch her focus from outdoors to spending time with her wines in various stages of fermentation. This season Brisbois will be releasing some Nouveaux wines and quick to bottle wines for the Quebec market that will happen first. She also has a single barrel of viogner that she is excited about working with. Throughout the winter the operation at Trail Estate scales back to just Brisbois on the wine-side. She will spend the majority of the winter solo, tasting her wines and guiding them to their fullest potential.

“We are a small enough operation here that I get to do everything myself and I like it that way. I love being hands-on and wouldn’t want it any other way,” says Brisbois.

Closer to the lake and to the village of Wellington you’ll find Keint- He Winery and winemaker Lee Baker. Baker has been the winemaker at Keint-He since April of 2016, and before that, he was in British Columbia at a winery called Church and State. He can compare firsthand the differences in growing grapes in the County versus on the West Coast. With factors like frost, humidity and drought not regularly present in BC, it allows for a much more dependable yield year-to-year and a more stable growing season.

For Baker, it was also a fast and furious harvest for his team at Keint-He. What bothered him the most was the fog in the mornings, which is never a good thing for grapes. Fog can be just as bad as rain for skin breakdown on grapes, so the foggy days were definitely on Baker’s radar as to when his product will come off the vines. A lot of the diseases that grapes deal with have to do with moisture and mildew. Spores from an infected grape are carried through via water trickle and down onto the different clusters of grapes underneath, thereby infecting them as well. Fog and humidity also make it hard for the plants to keep any sprays on the fruit. The spray just drips away on contact, leaving the grapes vulnerable.

For Baker to get the grapes picked and off the vines at the right time he is looking for a balance of three things: sugar, acid and flavour. The VQA measures the maturity of grapes by its sugar content, so winemakers are constantly monitoring their wines to wake sure that they are within VQA standards for release.

“This was a challenging year. There are always theories that we like to bounce off each other as to why. We had a lower yielding season as well as I think most wineries did in the area. Some people have had stories of great success this year and it leaves the rest of us with lower yields scratching our heads about what they did different,” says Baker.

Keint-He also had issues with staffing that affected when the vines were taken out of the ground this season. Baker and the winery rely on migrant workers for help in the high season, and the first round of workers were delayed a month getting into the country. So, the vines were delayed by a month in coming out of the ground. Baker thinks he may have lost some yields due to that but maintains the attitude that, there is no use in crying over spilt milk. For all three winemakers, the similarity between their harvest experience seemed to be the chaotic nature in which the grapes need to be harvested, and then the vines buried. Wineries in the County must be able to react instantly due to factors like the extreme weather conditions and when the frost arrives. Wineries must be ready to change their plans on a dime if needed and make decisions that can’t be second-guessed. The ability to roll with the punches seems to be the most valuable asset a winemaker can possess come harvest time in the County.