Prost! Podcast Episode #23 - John Thule - University of Minnesota Grape Breeding Program

Summary

In this episode of the PROST! podcast, host Scott Eckart interviews John Thull, an expert in cold climate viticulture from the University of Minnesota. They discuss the challenges and techniques of growing grape varieties that can withstand harsh winters, the legacy of Elmer Swenson in developing cold-hardy varieties, and the intricate process of breeding new grape varieties. John shares insights from his extensive experience in the field, including the importance of evaluating grape quality and the ongoing efforts to improve Minnesota's wine industry.

Keywords

cold climate viticulture, John Thull, grape breeding, Elmer Swenson, Minnesota wine, viticulture techniques, cold hardy varieties, vineyard management, grape varieties, winemaking

Takeaways

• Cold climate varieties can withstand extreme temperatures.
• Snow acts as an insulator for grapevines.
• John Thull has over 20 years of experience in viticulture.
• Elmer Swenson was instrumental in developing cold hardy grape varieties.
• The breeding process involves generating thousands of seeds annually.
• It takes years to evaluate the viability of new grape varieties.
• Grapes must have the right chemistry for winemaking.
• Training the palate is essential for evaluating grape quality.
• The Minnesota wine industry has evolved significantly since the 1970s.
• Collaboration is key in the grape breeding process.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Hey y'all, I hate to do this, but it's a timeless plug. If you're digging the podcast, you find anything interesting. Please like and subscribe either at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to Podcast really helps the show, apparently. And uh it'll help other people in the local area hear about these great winemakers and great uh things on artists. So please like and subscribe. Otherwise, y'all enjoy. All right. Welcome everybody. We're back to the Pros Podcast, and today I have the extreme honor of uh interviewing Mr. John Toole, um, who was one of my instructors. Uh, from it's crazy to think how long ago it's been. It feels like uh last year maybe, but I'm I uh looking back, I I want to say it was almost eight or nine years ago. Uh Vesta College I took in cold climate viticulture. You're also a bit of a renowned expert in cold climate viticulture uh with the University of Minnesota. I assume that you're still with them. Um, John, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_02 1:51

I'm doing pretty good, dude. It's uh finally got above 30 degrees in Minnesota, and it feels it feels nice. I just came out from the vineyard to sit in the van here a little bit and talk to you.

SPEAKER_03 2:02

So looking at we could definitely go all back on the vineyard. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Right on, man. Um well uh so it's actually probably warmer in Minnesota than it is here because it's uh it's in the 30s. It's warmer than it's been. I mean, we've we've had a uh just like everybody, a pretty, pretty cold uh spell here for the last four to six weeks with a lot of snow. I'm assuming it's been the same for you guys.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

It has been. We were looking at, you know, the beginning of January, maybe a little bit nicer, but throughout the whole mid of January, we were we were stuck in a cold spell for a while. I think we got to minus 23, 24 degrees Fahrenheit a couple of times, and it just sustained for things on end.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

I know a couple days we didn't even come up with zero, so um, I mean, it's you know, I mean, you guys specialize in the cold climate uh varieties, which we'll talk about. Um, shouldn't necessarily be a problem for most of these varieties, would you agree?

SPEAKER_02 3:04

Right. Uh um that's exactly it. If if all things are going well in the vines, they should be able to take, you know, minus 25 in stride pretty easily. Um, and we will be checking that fairly soon just to see how much damage might be in the vine. We we can do a certain technique of dissecting some buds with a little razor blade under um some magnification, and you'll be able to tell pretty easily how many buds out of 50 or however many we want to sample, how many of those uh bit it through the cold or are still alive. And this is something that we usually do on all these different varieties that we have.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Okay. And I mean, it just feels like to me, I know I I haven't, um, and maybe I I'm naive, but um the way we've kind of been set up this winter, um, it's not like this happened in in November or December. I mean, the the vines had, you know, even though it wasn't super cold, they're kind of in their deep sleep part of the season. Snow actually insulates the ground, so uh probably not going to see any vine death with these with these uh varieties. Um, you know, we we grow all hybrids as well, but we have more cat and some of the colder uh hardy varieties. Um so don't expect any below-the-ground death with especially with the snow. It's just a matter of of how how you know how the buds have sustained themselves. But with the fact that it's been kind of in the deep season here, it's been a gradual cooling um and not something with a huge diurnal. I mean, um, that's why we plant these varieties. Uh, are you feeling pretty good about where where you most of your cold climate vines are uh this year so far? Or is this still a little bit a little bit dicey with how much cold we've had for such an extended period of time?

SPEAKER_02 4:50

Um you know, thinking about it in December, the beginning of December, we dropped fairly quickly into some negative temperatures. And I thought that was maybe going to be one of those incidents where vines sustained a little bit of damage, you know, the buds or the vascular tissues and the vine above ground parts might have sustained some damage there. And and that might be the case, you know, we'll see. But otherwise, they were slowly tracking this cold weather, and yeah, I I feel like it did drop fairly fast when we did hit those real cold temperatures in January. Like this polar vortex thing kind of like came swooping down fairly quickly, and it I think it was a good 40-degree swing there. Um, so okay it'll be yet to be seen how these vines react to it, but I do know that we did uh we did some preliminary bud checking on things like Marquette and Itasca and even Adelweiss, and they looked pretty good the other day. Like they were they were well above like 90% um bud survival. And the buds that we did notice that were damaged, they looked really, really blackened, which to me told me that maybe that December event had already um injured some of these buds. And there is there were certain times where between Christmas and New Year's where the temperature was coming above, you know, freezing and everything. So if you have sustained time where the temperature is warm enough, you'll actually see those buds oxidizing and turning brown first, and then they turn real black once they dry out. And I did notice a few buds like that. But then on the other hand, I did notice a just a handful of buds too, out of the few things that we sampled so far that seem to be kind of like mushy brown, which indicates then maybe we got a little extra damage now with this recent, you know, cold temperature in January at polar vortex time. That was about but all in all, I mean it looks pretty pretty bright. Like if we're in the 90, 90 percentile of of aliveness in these buds, we're sitting pretty good, and there's not much difference that we have to do to the pruning style to accommodate for that kind of cold that we've had.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Cool.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Cool. All right. Well, we we just again we j we jumped right in. John, who are you? What what what is like why am I even talking to you? Like, give me your background. Let let the audience know um just exactly who this expert is on cold climate viticulture that I'm I'm speaking with today. Who are you, John?

SPEAKER_02 7:21

Yeah, man, I, you know, expert, that's a pretty big word. So I I have been in the industry here in Minnesota for a good 20 years. Um started working with the University of Minnesota in 2005. So that's yeah, just a shade over 20 years. Um I before that I had been doing uh an apprenticeship and working in Germany on the Mosul. So I kind of cut my chops there in the in the Mosul region where it's like it's just beautiful hanging cliffs of Riesling, really steep hillside, pretty picturesque towns. Um, just everything that you'd want to kind of do. It's it's very it was like that very romantic notion of a vineyard and so we've been to the Mosul.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Uh it's it's one of a kind, um, just absolutely gorgeous, and the wines are unbelievable. I love love Germany.

SPEAKER_03 8:20

Uh I was lucky enough to find a place that wanted to um take on an apprentice, and I was able to live and work with that family.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

Um the place is called Heinrichshof in Seltingen on the Mosel.

SPEAKER_03 8:33

It's real close to Burn Castle, it's the middle Mosul. And I did a full year of physics with those guys, which is phenomenal. And that was back in like 2003. So 2003 was stellar years for the Riesling on that particular stretch of the moon. Um they they claimed it was like one of one of those 100 years kind of vintage, and it felt like it. It felt like really fun. The green chemistry was beautiful and those great. And me not knowing that much, I mean I have a biology degree in the background and with a focus in plants, and I grew up on a dairy farm and gardening, and I always had like plants and gardening in the background, but growing grapevines was kind of elusive to me. I I remember wild vines on the fence lines on the farm and kind of enjoying that way to prepare a grape that's native to Minnesota in the whole midwind. Um but I didn't know how people actually cultivated grapes, and that that was kind of like a a curiosity that I was just always itching, and I really wanted to figure that out. That's what brought me to Germany eventually. And boy, when I was there, it just it kind of blew me away like how many different styles, for example, would one grape that you can make into this wine, um, known as Riesling, you know, Riesling is the grape, but I was surprised to realize that you know most of the time Riesling was sweet when I was growing up tasting Riesling wine, but this family that I worked with, they were specialized in in all styles, everything from the bone-dryest Riesling to mid-range, you know, sort of semi-sweet Riesling or off dry or fine hair, but they called it. They called it fine hair. Um, it was kind of a nice style. Um, and then to the easiest, sweetest stuff, we actually got to make the tropen bearing outflazers. Um they had it wasn't a year for ice line that particular year, but it was a nice year for um for their TV. So I learned a lot from those guys. They they really sort of set me up for the next adventure that I didn't even actually know where I was gonna go. But I sort of uh when I came back home in 2004, I put out a call to the University of Minnesota research hor horticulture research program that has a great degree going on, and I went I just put a cold call or a cold email out asking if I could even come and just volunteer for a little while and help those guys out back then. And sure enough, they they offered me a well it wasn't a job right away, but they said, hey, why don't you just come down and see see what the place is all about, see if you like it, um maybe we'll even give you a little interview along the way and yeah and never look back from them.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Awesome, awesome. So you're originally from Minnesota?

SPEAKER_03 11:22

Yeah, that's right. I grew up in uh central Minnesota, small town area, it's called Greenwood, Minnesota, it's close to Belroa Stock Center, so if you're in the center part of the state, St. Cloud is one of the bigger cities nearby. Um but yeah, uh I'm native from Minnesota and went to school in Minnesota and eventually found my way into this grape world, which is kind of strange for in a Minnesota, I think. But thanks to the guys that came before, you know, there's been a lot of work throughout the years of people working on breeding grapes that can actually sustain our climate to thrive. And you know, prior to the 70s, I would say there was really nothing of a wine industry in Minnesota. There was a few uh rebellious guys that's probably back in the 70s that started. Maybe we can do this. I'm doing a and um yeah, so I don't know. It's just kind of it was interesting to see that there's actually grapes that could grow here, you know.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

Anyways, um so agreed. Um, did you know anything about Elmer Swinson and and all that uh stuff to kind of it's just such a fascinating story. Minnesota's so unique. Um, and then you know, obviously that that's an incredible story for the people that knew him and and the work that he did that still carries on and influences the industry to bam. Now you've got Marquette and Frontnak and and uh Frontnak Grie and Blanc and I now Itasca that is basically um responsible for cold climate winemaking. Um that's that's it's such an improbable and incredible story. Were you privy to any of that? I mean, you must have heard a little bit about them, uh uh being a biology plant guy and then finding your way to the Mosul. You must have known a little bit about what was going on. Um uh you know, tell me tell me a little bit about um who those people were and and uh you know where where how it got to where it is today, because again, and we'll get into what's going on in Indiana maybe a little bit, but um it we I think for the places here that have vineyards, which is you know maybe less than a quarter of the actual wineries, but the people that are doing it the old-fashioned way growing the grapes are more and more gravitating towards these uber cold hardy varieties like a Marquette, like Petite Pearl. Uh, I know that wasn't necessarily a Minnesota variety, but just the the fact that they are still climate, not bulletproof. Um Marquette, famously an early butter, and so we take some damage every year, but it makes such an unbelievable wine, and it's and it it's not subject to um you know these crazy, for the most part, these crazy uh, you know, polar vortexes and stuff, whereas uh um even our Chomberson tends to be, while it should work on papers, tends to be a little bit too cold tender. Uh, especially this year, I bet we'll see some damage on that one in particular. Um, anyways, uh what you know what what did you know about Minnesota and what makes it so unique? Culturally, um, it's it's quite uh not a juggernaut, but without what the work that's been done there, um the landscape for Midwestern and Great Lakes viticulture and and winemaking would be vastly different. So what's your take on that?

SPEAKER_02 14:53

Well, uh yeah, that's uh it's kind of interesting. I didn't I really didn't know a lot about what was going on in Minnesota before I went to Germany. So, like prior to 2003, I guess I I did understand that there was something happening when I was going to college um at uh the University of Minnesota in Duluth, I was also kind of for my part-time summer jobs, I was helping this one guy out design his yard, and and he really wanted to have a lot of fruit trees, and and vineyard was one of the things that he wanted to have in there. So I was kind of ri researching along the way about what grapes could actually grow in Minnesota. Um, I learned early along the way that you know there's a lot of different swent and varieties.

SPEAKER_03 15:39

I remember seeing um Prairie Star pop up a lot in those searches. And, you know, Google was kind of young back in the late 90s.

SPEAKER_02 15:50

Um Brontan seemed to be popping up, um, King of the North. There was all these different grapes, and I didn't know who or where they really all came from. It was just sort of there's little bits and pieces of information out there. I found along the way, yeah, there was the Elmer Swenson varieties that had come out, and and then the University of Minnesota's work had furthered some of this early um cold-hardy work. Um but yeah, it was I learned a lot along the way actually as I started working at the university's um university's um grape reading program, then that's where I really learned to figure out like what what Elmer was all up to and and how he had uh come up with a lot of stuff. And realizing that he was you know very instrumental in in uh creating a a bit of an industry for you know table grape growing, first and foremost, and some of that was leading into the wine uh making ability as well.

SPEAKER_03 16:48

Some of those grapes that he developed were you know dual purpose in some sense. So that was pretty cool.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Are you uh are you guys uh snow covered?

SPEAKER_02 17:01

Yes, we definitely have snow, you know, like you can see outside in the the vineyard here. Uh lots of good snow.

SPEAKER_03 17:09

So it's and that's fortunate because last year we didn't have a lot of snow covered. The dogs love that.

SPEAKER_02 17:16

Last year with the not so much snow cover, we saw a lot of root damage on our vines. And so we've had a this past growing season was. Yeah, the snow's great for I mean it doesn't protect the top of the vine whatsoever, but anything that's under the ground and your roots, they don't like to freeze very hard. And you know, that was a case for us last year. So a lot of growers were wondering why why are my marquette vines failing this year? Why are why am I seeing damage? Why am I seeing weak growth on these vines? It was because a lot of these beater roots had frozen off last season. So in the 2024-25 winter, we saw a lot of root damage coming out of that out of that season. And this year it's nice and covered for the most part. Yeah.

unknown 18:02

We didn't good.

SPEAKER_02 18:03

So I I don't fear that as much, but the above portion of the vines are still exposed. But I hope we gotten b past the toughest part of the winter by now.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Yeah, I would think so. You never know. But um, so what vineyard are you pruning? Is this your own personal vineyard?

SPEAKER_02 18:20

No, it's not my personal vineyard. Uh this is working at the University of Minnesota's vineyard at the moment. So we're just uh pruning away, getting first couple of vines, you know, first fields pruned up and um yeah, it's it's um it's we got lots to go. We got we run about twelve acres of vines out here. And I guess we're maybe we we started back in December already with some early pruning on some younger vines that we knew that they were gonna die back to a certain point anyway. Uh but now we're hitting all of our we're just going through the fields vine by vine and and take care of things. It's a it's a unique situation out here where And are you Yeah. Yeah, and we have a we got a like a unique situation where not all vines are the same age at any given moment. You know, it's a breeding program, so we're trying to always create new varieties, and so as space opens up as we discard old vines, we're bringing in new vines and planting those new vines that we're creating here. So it's uh yeah, it's constant rollover of of vines.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

So it's not uh yeah, it's not like you're like, oh, this Marquette vine died, I'm gonna put another vi uh Marquette. You're you're bringing in a brand new variety. So I assume that's quite um uh an arduous um documentation process to to keep track, oh this, you know, this row, this vine is is a is a new, I guess a new crossing of some sort, right? I mean you're you literally are still in the process of continuing you know the same work that Elmer Swenson did, right? You're you're you're cataloging and and trying new varieties, is that correct?

SPEAKER_02 20:09

Right, right. Um essentially doing the same kind of work, um doing the breeding. Um and of course there's a whole team here of us that does this together. So um I work with my wife Jenny, we've got another guy on staff, Colin Zumwalt, we got our project lead, uh, student Lee Tay. Um we've got Aaron Triver who's working with table grapes. Uh we've got a lot of people coming in and out of the vineyard um and helping with this with this whole breeding process. But it is a very exciting uh project to do and definitely, you know, we're creating, we're generating maybe like some 5,000, 6,000 seeds every year. And we're germinating most of those from year to year. So when you get a certain germination rate of say 80%, you know, we're we're always handling between 4,000 and 5,000 brand new grape plants from year to year that have to get dealt with and and find a home somewhere within a collection of mine. Yeah, it's it's it's kind of a big unwieldy.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

How how long does it how long does it take for you to kind of get a sense that that maybe something is worth uh you know, looking deeper into? And then certainly kind of the the coup d'etat where you're like, this thing might have some legs, this this might actually be a variety that growers are interested in. I mean, that that's gotta be a minimum of 10 year process to even start to have a instinct that maybe something is is worth putting into a uh an expensive French oak barrel or something.

SPEAKER_02 21:50

Well, right, that's for sure. Um the whole process is uh it you know, it's it's a there's a lot to it, but basically think about like creating Generating a seed, you know, we can generate all those five thousand seeds per year pretty easily. Um, but then growing out each seed length, um, and seeing how that performs, you know, that takes time. So once you've got a vine um that can go into the ground, you know, from a seed, it takes about a year or two before it actually gets into the ground. So let's take it like this crossing, the year that you cross and generate the seed, it's gonna be two years before you put that vine into a permanent location in the vineyard. And then it takes about three years from there in order for that thing to give you enough decent fruit and growth to uh start judging it based on flavors and and how it's performing in the vineyard. And then another couple years before you get enough fruit to actually maybe think about making wine, we're talking like five or six years and yeah, once you get it like you can get an inkling, you can get like a idea, like hey, this is this is looking pretty good. But um it does take a lot more years of tracking uh using the vines through all the different weather scenarios to determine whether this thing is gonna be make it or not. And we're doing that constantly with you know, roughly between at any given moment, we probably have 14, 15,000 vines on the property.

SPEAKER_03 23:29

You know, a lot of those drop out from year to year, and then a lot of new ones are added in from year to year.

SPEAKER_02 23:34

But we always kind of hover around that 15,000 vines, you know, sorting through all those, you know, you have a bunch of them that are young, that aren't you're not able to taste them yet, but then you also know you got a lot of them that are older that are coming in, so it's like an avalanche of things that you have to kind of keep ahead of and and keep sort of developing, uh not developing, but you know, just keep tasting those things and making sure that they're uh that they're performing the way you want.

SPEAKER_03 24:05

If they're not performing anyway, like they're not hardy enough, they don't taste good, they don't have a good growth habit, they're too disease-riddled, any of those things can be a reason to check off as vine and get it.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

Okay. Um how much variability is there in say, well, just pick one variable taste. Um I mean, again, I've I've never been on on your side of the equation there um where you're you're tasting these things. But I mean, um obviously not all grapes produce uh grape vines. In fact, most don't produce viable fruit, and certainly not the type of fruit you'd want to maybe that would have the chemistry to make good wine. But I mean, um just tell me, g give me a sense for for somebody that doesn't know uh what that's like. Um I mean, does it range from just completely unpalatable to just it's bland or um I mean, because it's just obviously as a winemaker, um it it's so fascinating to taste the grape juice, which is liquid gold and absolutely delicious, but still really until that fermentation and aging process happens, it unlocks just so much complexity. It's it's still a marvel, uh wonder of the universe as far as I'm concerned. Um hard to even fathom um you know developing that substrate on the the the seedling level. I mean, what do you what does it look like? What does it taste like? What how do you know when you have something that that tastes like you might want to go the next step with it?

SPEAKER_02 25:43

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, well, first of all, like having your palate trained in other varieties that actually do taste good around the world, um, that helps.

SPEAKER_03 25:55

So in our breeding program here, we've got a lot of uh, if you will, uhnifera types that we grow. Uh whether we grow them and cover them um for purposes of just how food performs or getting the pollen from these vines, or we have these vines also growing in pots in the greenhouse. Um, yeah, there's many, there's different ways that we can grow these venifera in Minnesota. But that's kind of a key concept there.

SPEAKER_02 26:22

Is like these already have like good chemistry. So if you taste them when they're ripe, you start to understand what a good grape tastes like having the right chemistry. Flavor and all those things, that's that's kind of subjective, subjective.

SPEAKER_03 26:37

Um but there's if it it has to sort of give you the right check marks as far as acid and sugar balance and a few of those factors. So you don't want things that are like super bitter either and super herbaceous, you don't want things that are somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

All right, so you're just kind of keeping it in that Goldilocks, you know, you're not too not too not too, you know, acidic, not not not too you know, not too high a pH. You know, you want obviously to make make the job easy for the for the winemaker. Th the some of those other more esoteric aspects, is it cherry or is it berry, is it strawberry, is it raspberry? You you worry about those things later. What if the chemistry is good then then you'll you'll kind of push the I believe button? Um you you you did say that you have some vinifera there that you um play with to uh again kind of have a standard that you can compare against. Um how do you determine what to cross what with? I mean, who kind of makes those big decisions? Um and what what are some of the vinifera varieties that are popular to cross with the stuff that you're working with?

SPEAKER_02 27:51

Um this is that's a great question too. There is I mean, we have a lot of different, we've got maybe 150 to 200 different vinifera types.

SPEAKER_03 28:05

Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 28:07

I'm just it's the phone is shutting down here.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Can you hear me yet? Okay. I can hear you. We'll uh I'll uh I'll send you an email and we'll see if we can reschedule. All righty, we're back for round two with Mr. John Toole. Thank you for rejoining me.

SPEAKER_02 28:38

Scott, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

Oh, no problem, man. And again, um we we we uh had a little bit of a uh technical difficulty, but uh Mr. Toole, who is uh again um out there pruning, first nice day. Um I I expect nothing less. I mean, um so yeah, uh totally, totally get it. Um appreciate you coming back and uh talking to us about um what you guys got going on up there. I believe we were talking about the great breeding program and and how extremely arduous that is just to to get it cutting. Uh it is obviously work that was born um uh uh uh well back in the day with uh Mr. Elmer Swinson. And you've uh I mean it sounds like honestly, you've kind of carried on the torch. You're you're are you in some ways uh his heir apparent? Um I mean, uh do you have any of his notes? Um um and like what what does that look like what when you guys get together and like is it your mission to come up with the next great you know, wine grape that everybody that's in a cold climate can make uh amazing wines from? I mean, what what's your motivation?

SPEAKER_02 29:48

Oh well, I mean, where to begin? There's a lot a lot to unload and unpack and all of that. Um I am well put it this way, we it is a team effort at the breeding program at the University of Minnesota's uh great breeding and enology program. So I've been able to help along um for the last 20 years or more. And honestly, the program, the University of Minnesota's research station started off as the fruit breeding farm back in 1908 already. So it's got a good long history of breeding um cold-hardy apples. They were doing they were dabbling in grapes back in the day. Um, other fruit trees like plums and raspberries all were being worked on a long, long time ago. And then throughout the years, you know, you've had amateur breeders along the way like Elmer Swenson and and others. And in the current era, you know, Tom Plocker pushing the envelope, um, other great folks working, you know, outside of Minnesota as well. There's there's lots of people always working on this, and it's a it's usually been a great collaboration, you know. Um in the when I started working at the University of Minnesota, um, Dr. Jim Luby and Peter Peter Hempstead were in charge of the breeding program, and I learned a ton of all of this through those guys, and I I missed the era of Elmer Swenson. Um I came in at 2005 and he had just passed away maybe that November of December uh or December in 2004. So yeah, that was that was kind of unfortunate. I never got to meet Elmer Swenson, but you know, I always had heard about the work that he had done and and slowly got to be familiar with uh the grapes that he developed. We we certainly carry on a lot of the varieties that he was working with. Um we've got a lot of his name varieties, varieties that other people named over time, like Sabervois. Um guys, can you grab her? So um, as I was saying, uh those varieties that Elmer had been working on or named by other folks like Sabervois, Saint Croix, St. Pepin, um Lacrasse, Prairie Star. And then there's a whole host of like unnamed varieties that he developed um with just ES, such and such number, you know, system that he was using. So we have a lot of that material to build on, and especially that stuff is valuable for um for table grape breeding because Elmer was such an enthusiast of having a fresh eating table grape. You know, it might not be all that known that he wasn't really into drinking wine that much. Um so he wasn't after a wine grape, but it did turn out that Edelweites happens to make a great wine as well, and some of those other varieties do make good wine as well as fresh eating table grapes. So yeah. The um, but the the program, you know, what we work on currently, uh so our director is Dr. Sun Lee Tay, and he's in charge of our grape breeding program. And along with him and my wife Jenny and the rest of the crew, that includes Colin Zumwalt and Aaron Treiber, um, it's a it's you it's a usually a good group collaboration of bringing all of our ideas to the table, and then let's see what you know can shake loots with this, because we all have like different aspects of knowledge about what these grapes can do and how we can combine them to make something that might turn out to be the next best thing. And that is that takes it takes strategy to some extent for sure, but you also have to have like this inner idea of how these vines behave on their own and what attributes, what are the best attributes that you want to get from this vine and combine with the good attributes of another vine.

SPEAKER_04 34:00

Right.

SPEAKER_02 34:00

And honestly, most of the time it doesn't it doesn't shake out. So, like if you're gonna make a hundred seedlings um from a cross, you take two grapes and cross them together and you get a hundred seeds, and now you got maybe a hundred seedlings germinate out of that if you're lucky to get a hundred percent. Um, boy, ninety ninety-five, ninety-seven percent of those are just dogs. And you're lucky to like nudge the needle forward with a couple of them that turn out to be worthwhile to keep going forward, that were better than the parent.

SPEAKER_00 34:36

I I guess that's part of what I was curious about. I mean, uh again, I I just from my perspective as a young business owner that has planted some of the grapes that you know University of Minnesota is responsible for, and there's at least hundreds, if not, you know, thousands of wineries that are planting and using the grapes that would not be otherwise able to do it. I mean, I I hold you guys in, you know, uh just kind of a uh at a high pedestal. It's just uh we're so fortunate to have that work done. Um, I'm just curious how many grapes were just like Marquette, but then like Marquette was just a little bit better. But it sounds like if you're saying 96, 97 out of 100 seedlings, it's kind of like a jewel in the rough. Every now and you get fine one and you're like, wow, mother, mother nature's giving us something special here. Is it obvious or is it is it still just a complete crapshoot?

SPEAKER_02 35:31

I mean, so when when you hit that vine, when you find that vine, when you taste that fruit, it it becomes obvious now that we have the experience that we do. Like when I started out, obviously I didn't know much about all these different varieties from from anything else. But as you grow into the the job, as you start learning more about not only the varieties that are at hand in the cold climate, you learn about cool climate varieties such as Savol or Vignol or Vidal Blanc, you know, all these other varieties that are grown in different regions. And then if you can expand your knowledge too into the vanifera types that originally come out of Europe or the Middle East, whether they're table grapes or wine grapes, um, the more grapes that you can grow and get your hands on and learn from, it just helps you in your ideas of what combination of things could be bred together. And that that takes time to like gain all that knowledge because obviously there's like thousands of varieties out there to work with. Yeah, but only a handful are hardy enough for us to work with.

SPEAKER_00 36:36

Yeah, it's it's very esoteric. It's it's it's not knowledge that you can just go to the library and pick up a book and read about. I mean, it's like you're actually developing that that that information, which is you know, um tedious, I'm I'm sure. Um I guess maybe shifting gears a little bit, um, because you know, I when we when I did your your your course on co-climate viticulture, again, um at that time, yeah, there was great breeding, but I mean I think it seemed like to me from an outside observer down in Indiana, um, a lot of the the literature that you would get about Minnesota was really touting Marquette, Frontenac, Frontenac Block, Frontenac Green, and uh La Crescent as as very viable grapes. And they've kind of stood up these last, you know, 10 years. People are making fantastic wines. Um, Marquette, I think, for me is is um well, they're they're all quite capable grapes. Um I've I think I've pretty much had an opportunity to work with all of them and uh and love them. I mean, they're just I've talked to winemakers in New York that are like, yeah, we're we're getting rid of some of the cab frock, we're putting a marquette, we just keep getting wiped out, you know. I mean, um, so it's it's you know, it's a it's no small thing that that you guys have have have done. And and um so again, uh we we certainly appreciate the work that you're doing. And then uh I know that Itasca was just coming on the scene. How has that one kind of panned out for you? Are people is it um is it that dry white wine that people hoped it would be?

SPEAKER_02 38:12

Yeah, I would say yes. I mean it's it's been performing really well for people. Um Its hardiness has been really great in the vineyard, and then the wine chemistry, the juice chemistry coming out of the field has been pretty spot on. Um, very comparable to numbers that people would be used to when they're dealing with um bonifera juice. So let's say, and what are those numbers we're looking for? Well, we want the acid to be under 10 grams per liter, um maybe more around eight or nine grams per liter if it's a white, maybe a little bit less if it's a nice red wine. Um you're looking for pHs that are in that 3.1, 3.3 range, maybe 3.4. That's a little bit hard to get at the moment, but 3.2 is kind of a sweet spot for a pH. And um the sugars, you know, you want the bricks to be not over the off the charts high, but you do want it in that range of like 22, 23, maybe up to 25 bricks. And Itasca was one of these varieties that kind of hit those numbers in a sweet spot, more so than the previous generation with the Frontenac Gris, which is one of its parents, and Frontenac Blanc and Frontenac, those those guys were like one generation from wild, the Frontenac was. And then it happened to give those sport mutations, those color mutations into Gris and Blanc. But in my mind, always those they were great stepping stones from being half wild, half riparia, but they always retained a high amount of acidity, right? And so that is tricky in the winery, and to go one step beyond that with one more generation to to re to reveal something like itasca was pretty special. So it just goes to show there's a lot of you know, and it takes a lot of luck, first of all, to like get those genetics to line up correctly, but then you have to be able to be there in the field and find that. Like, like you said, those diamonds in the rough. We definitely have twelve, fifteen thousand different vines in the property at any given moment.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Uh it's mind-boggling.

SPEAKER_02 40:18

Yeah, to sort through those all and find the ones that really shine from year to year. That's part of the fun of the of the job for sure. You know, the fall comes and you gotta burn your tongue on a lot of sour stuff to find a couple of sweet ones, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_00 40:31

And I mean, it's I know this is kind of a stupid comment because uh you know the answer, but literally every grape seed is a different variety if you plant it, right? I mean, that's it's hard to fathom.

SPEAKER_02 40:44

Yes, every grape seed has its own genetic. It's just like children, you know, you've got two parents and then each child is different from its sibling. But in grapes, we can create, you know, hundreds of siblings, if not thousands, out of a single cross real quickly. And but each one of those has unique traits. So you it's it's up to us then to find the ones that have the best traits.

SPEAKER_00 41:09

No, I guess it doesn't really surprise that from the people that I know that grow frontnac, the three different varieties, they all say that it's one of the best growing vines in the vineyard. They love working with it. Compared to like a Marquette for us, which grows sideways. We have it on VSP, but it it it almost, you know, it it's very unruly. It requires a lot of of uh um babysitting. But everybody seems to love uh frontac, um, all three varieties. Uh do you think that's partly because it's so close to being a wild vine, potentially?

SPEAKER_02 41:45

Well, actually, I think Frontenac has a very nice orderly growth habit. I mean, it it when you put it into heavy, fertile soil, it can become a little bit unruly, but most vines will react that way. When you compare the way Frontenac grows compared to how Marquette grows, it's just night and day difference. I mean, the canes are nice and slender on the Frontenac family of grapes. There's very few um tendril, there's very few laterals in a lot of cases, unless it's in that kind of fertile soil situation. Um, whereas Marquette, you can put it on the same soil type, and you'll see that that one grows quite a bit more vigorous, and it has a like smaller um clusters of fruits. So that has implications on the way the vine grows. So Marquette tends to be a little bit more vegetative, I think, growing more shoots, more lateral shoots, maybe a little more tendrally tendency. Whereas the frontanacs are got this heavy crop of big clusters, and that maybe is part of the reason why they they put a lot of energy into those fruit clusters, and then it sort of s saps or reduces the amount of vigor that is allowed to go into the shoots and into the vegetative part.

SPEAKER_00 43:02

But so we we grow on VSP. Um we have our Marquette on uh 7x9 spacing VSP. Beautiful in the vineyard. It's a lot of work because we're constantly kind of we don't comb down, we actually like kind of comb up to try and get it up through the catch wires. Um but what after we've done the initial work, it looks beautiful. And you look like you got this huge crop. And just like you saying, with that Pinot Noir and its lineage, I mean the clusters look like Pinot, they're itty bitty tiny things. And the must weight is it's a fraction of what you're expecting because it just doesn't, you know, it's not particularly heavy. It's vigorous. Um, I'm I mean, would that be a a situation where maybe we need to lose leave a few more chutes and and uh a few more try and get more clusters on each vine to help with that? Would that be kind of the diagnosis for something like that?

SPEAKER_02 43:56

Yeah, um you certainly there's a limit to how many shoots you. can fit in a specific let's say a linear foot of trellis wire, right? So your limitation is maybe six shoots per foot is comfortable with Marquette. You can push it to seven or eight, but it starts to get really crowded as you get toward beyond eight and towards ten. And that that just defeats the purpose. Now you got like this dense canopy and your fruit is suffering too because it's not even you can't get it in the sun. So I don't know um when you let's let's look at the system the the VSP system the vertical shoot positioning trellis system. In the case of Marquette it usually does bring the yield down a little bit because yeah the vegetative growth is taking over so strongly going upward and it seems to reduce the cluster size to some extent. Whereas if you put that same vine in the same situation same soil onto a high wire system I think generally you can you can coax out a little bit more fruit compared to the VSP in that same situation. And so that that has something to do with the way the shoots are orientated when you're positioning the shoots to go upright they really want to grow upright and they focus a lot of growth into that. When you put the shoot position downward or procumbent or hanging or draping down toward the ground it kind of breaks that that hormonal influence that's coming from the shoot tip and it ends up reacting differently it it sets the vine up differently it sets the fruit up differently so that the clusters can maybe become just a little bit bigger. But this is all this is all kind of here and there too. I mean you also got to think about whether you're spur pruning or cane pruning because that does have a big implication on what kind of fruit clusters you're going to develop. The spur the spur buds almost always have smaller compact clusters held inside them versus the the buds that are further out along a cane. So let's say typical spurs are made out of like one the node one, two and three right you got a like a two to three inch spur sitting there where your cane is much longer than that. It's like up to two two and a half maybe up to even three feet in length at the at its max.

SPEAKER_00 46:18

So you're carrying Yeah we we we we definitely keep them less than two feet we we as a rule if we're on six foot spacing we we we go a little bit shorter than that three foot um just because we've we've learned the hard way that that that usually doesn't make the vine uh productive like we want it to be yes but you are still trying to use canes is what you're saying right we we end up I mean challenging conditions here in the Midwest um it seems to be kind of a modified spur around the head region but um almost universally we we end up with a short probably one to one and a half foot cane at the end. So it's kind of uh it's a hybrid it's a hybrid.

SPEAKER_02 47:06

I I like that because we're we're always promoting that too where however you can get the work done we do this spur and cane uh pruning combination quite often and it seems to as long as you can kind of keep it in check from year to year and fix it with pruning the next season again you can always keep that combination rolling going forward. And quite often we'll do like two canes with each other to make up for buds that might be positioned weirdly or from bud lost in the winter. So the double cane pruning one direction and two canes the other direction seems to also help.

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Yeah yeah and and obviously we have renewals going down there but um yeah it just if if if I could I would love to put the vine on on uh you know if it's on six foot spacing two nice California style three foot cordons on each side bilateral and and exta establishes but I mean I I mean that's one thing I want to get into is trunk disease and and just the I mean obviously spare parts I mean we we you know we are constantly having to f to figure out where the next part of the vine is and it and it does reduce vigor for sure.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

Now that with that being said yeah I was just gonna mention I was just gonna mention that you're when you're working with Marquette that is kind of the case it's tricky to make that work but now if you haven't had itasca growing you should see how that thing grows it does have a nice cane structure and in general because it's such a hardy vine um we've been really recommending people use canes in that system because it does give you nice clusters of fruit um coming out of those bigger buds that are further out on the cane versus the spurs. And it's it spaces the the shoots are spaced so nicely almost to a fault where they're spaced a little bit too much. So that's where we do the double cane pruning again where we lay two canes together to make up for and it it works really well with ITA it's it's a little bit different and you gotta you gotta realize the nuance between each variety and what it likes to be.

SPEAKER_00 49:16

I think we're definitely guilty of kind of like it's a one system fits all and I think this year our Vignoles which is also on VESP I'm gonna have our our team and and me um put it on a high wider it has been very very unproductive on on the on the midwire it looks beautiful but it's just not giving us fruit you know and and that's not really um a good deal I don't think um so trunk disease I mean uh I I work with um Fritz Westover at Westover Viticulture um um doing the Virtual Viticulture Academy and we're you know we use him as kind of learned a ton he's really helped our pruning out um pay attention to a lot of his his uh live seminars and um uh and you know his his the different webinars that he does and and yeah it seems like uh trunk disease is is not just unique to our vineyard it's everywhere is is is it uh you know is it does it seem like it's worse than it's ever been um is it just one of those realities that you have to deal with I I know when I was taking your classes I was like I gotta get we're in a cold climate I gotta get the spray program right I gotta and it seems like the things you know unfortunately spray drift is something that I deal with um that's a man-made um thing that we're we're trying to head off but it shouldn't happen but it does but that's been uh messing our architecture up midway through the season and and it and it's it's just not helping the cause but trunk disease has has really been something that I mean we're we're if we're shooting for five percent replants we're probably more than you know 10% or 15% a year um with some of these varieties. Part of it is I think cold climate. In 2022 we had an insane like 70 degree diurnal on December 22nd and the varieties like Chomberston that should work here that had been enjoying 60 degree weather um the next spring when we were pruning the trunks were wet because apparently it cracked radially from sap flow happening and you could see the sap coming out and I mean that block of you know 800 vines half of them have already been replaced because of trunk disease that came in. So yeah it's it's a kick in the teeth and the and definitely a reality check. Is that is that something you deal with or I I know um in talking to one of the viticulturists he's like well you are in Indiana and and at least up in Iowa and and and and Minnesota when it gets cold it gets cold and um you know they're they're a little bit climatically protected is kind of the vibe that I got. I don't know what what's your sense on on for new growers uh just the challenges of of of uh trunk disease I mean it's a huge topic obviously and we're still learning more but um yeah there's so the trunk diseases that occur in the trunk um you know there's there's a couple of different things that are going on in these when you're getting those stress fractures so to speak in the midwinter you're saying things are warming up and then cooling down quickly and let's say you're more at the bookend of the winter toward spring and this is happening yeah you can get some sap flow you can get some deacclimation happening in the vine you can get you can lose that hardiness right where they were in that dormant period and now they're ready to start almost growing and that kind of injury as I would call it trunk injury from like a mechanical physical like frosting or freezing it that that definitely happens a lot to us.

SPEAKER_02 53:02

And what do you do about it? I mean I guess you have to kind of keep an eye out to make sure that if your trunks have these cracks in them or you see weeping coming out of the trunks in the springtime you have to realize like some winter injury some cold injury has happened there. And then on top of it when that sap happens there fungi and bacteria are coming in to feed on that sap in the springtime and that's like a big entry point for all these diseases for the trunk diseases to come and move in. So you got this combination of winter injury leading into like trunk diseases that's right that are coming and some of those trunk diseases might be crown gall related where you've got like that expansion like you've got yeah yeah yeah like a physical like like pipes bursting so to speak in your trunk and now the vine wants to heal those over in the springtime well it takes like it develops callus material which is basically just fusing the cells back together um fixing itself but along the way you end up getting encapsulating some of the crone gull bacteria in those trunks and that's where you'll see like a year or two down the road you've got this crone gall that's a nasty cancerous looking gall on the base of your vine and those need to get definitely replaced or retrained. And the best thing you can do is as long as you're not on rootstocks, I mean you can do it with rootstocks but you've got to make sure you're not training up the rootstock versus the scion. And fortunately most most of our cold hardy hybrids we're not putting we're not grafting them so you can train any kind of sucker that comes from the near the base of the vine or directly from the ground even to fix that system to fix that trunk that's been diseased and and injured in different ways. But we definitely deal with it and I tell you what um last year we had a very open winter in a large part of Minnesota and we got really cold at the same time we had some of the deepest thickest ice on some of our lakes and that that cold pressure sunk into the ground really deeply as well. And what does that mean? Our feeder roots really got injured in that situation. So the vine has roots that are grabbing nutrients close to the soil surface with you know let's say from the soil surface down to about six twelve inches I'm talking about those feeder roots were terribly injured last year so I'm talking about 2025 leading into that season um we had a lot of root injury based on that really cold plunging deep into the ground and what's the result of that is maybe the tap roots that are a little bit deeper going after deeper water those might have survived but maybe not all the time and we saw a huge amount of vines collapse or just not even push bud in the springtime because of that root injury and that's something I don't see all the time we when we have an open winter it's it's that danger is present but if we have a good snow cover uh we usually have nice roots that are just thriving.

SPEAKER_00 56:07

For example this way Yeah go ahead well how many when you say you had a lot of vines collapsing I mean what are we talking 10 25 50% how how many got got got really uh sizably reduced or stunted in their growth uh so how many vines got injured that's it's kind of hard for me to just percentage yeah I mean since we have such a huge amount it was it was it I mean it could it could be up to like fifteen percent on some of our varieties okay were which is huge to me.

SPEAKER_02 56:44

I mean that's a big deal when you're looking at 15 or 20 percent uh of the I just didn't know if we were talking like fifty percent or yeah yeah and it it's it's it's variety by variety a little bit you know some were able to weather that a little bit better than others and then of course the site that you're dealing with if you're on a really kind of a wet or a low site those seem to struggle more than other places that were protected differently or a little bit more moderate in their in their in the vigor of the soil for example or the fertility of the soil. So these are all little factors that are hard to quantize exactly but you get a feel for it. You get a sense of where these vines are working and you get a sense where they're not working.

SPEAKER_00 57:28

And over time you just gotta find those places where they work right yeah yeah absolutely yeah so definitely snow cover good uh bare ground and subarctic temperatures not not not so much. Um so trunk disease uh pretty pretty much ubiquitous um is there anything that you do um to help protect pruning runes do you spray tops and m or um use any sealants or anything like that? Um what what is kind of the the university approach to uh at least trying to do something to pro to ward off and I guess the next part of that question would be if the slap sap flow is exogenous around the time where it's waking up my understanding is that the the vine can't both take the bacteria into the vine when it's exp you know expelling the the sap flow so you're there is a little bit of protection there. You know what what are some of the I guess high level things that you do to protect when you're pruning other than prune early which is probably way smarter than pruning in in March like most people in the Midwest including us does um when it's the rainy season which is not probably the smartest thing to do.

SPEAKER_02 58:49

Yeah right I well first of all thinking about any any fungicides or things like that I I have not done that I have not painted over the wound. My approach has been over the years, you know, when I first started I used to really be a big proponent of cutting those wounds tight and flush to the trunks or the cordons if you were going to get rid of something. I've moved away from that quite a bit and started leaving longer stub in place of those cuts so that that stub can accept that first barrage of any bacteria or trunk fungal disease that might want to enter and then the plan is to cut that stub more tighter more flush the next season once it's dried back. You get it? So it's like a two cut dieback cuts. Yeah exactly so double double pruning double pruning somewhat like that or just leaving leaving a little bit more of a stub. I mean I and I hated to change that way but it's it's kind of the way we learned a hard lesson I would say by 2019 2020 there was a string of about five really wet years wet seasons in Minnesota and throughout the Midwest you know southern Minnesota Wisconsin everybody was dealing with a lot of trunk in uh diseases and that was largely due to that wet condition it was just like wet wet humid conditions all those wounds were just ripe areas for diseases to move in for bacteria or fungus to kind of those wood rot diseases were coming in with those wet conditions. And yeah we were seeing vines collapse so the solution for us along the way was to you know start moving toward that longer leaving stubs pruning those stubs out the next season when they're dry but also retraining the vines altogether and start growing up new suckers or or replacing parts of the cordon at least to um get rid of some of that old wood because it's a twofold factor I mean you've you've got disease coming in but you also got that that disease happening because of cold injury so yeah it's uh it's not it's never fun and it's never like easy but you gotta you gotta find a way to keep those vines rejuvenated and thriving. And we do that a lot with like sucker renewal or cane renewal system. Um and we have to pick and choose our battles when it works out best because a winter like maybe this year has been a little bit harsher. A variety like Marquette may not be fully alive on its canes so it's not always the best season to do a full-on cane renewal system. You gotta pick those winters when it's a little more of an easy winter.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:42

All right so um as we kind of wrap it up here um obviously you guys have the great breeding program but you still are managing vineyards of the vines that you guys are known for like I said the Marquette, the Frontenac, uh Lacresta and Itasca. And what are you what are you doing with those? Are those just kind of there so that you can monitor over time and continue to gather data and and and do some research? The students come out and maybe do tests on those and um you know how what what's kind of the the I guess the percentage of time spent? Is most of what you guys do developing new wine and table grape varieties or is it um uh much more varied than that?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:28

No largely I mean our our main goal our main job is to generate these new plants these new vines from year to year and then maintain and grow those new vines in whatever space we can fit them in our roughly 12 acres of vineyard at the research center. In and among that research center that 12 acres I'd say like 90 maybe 95% of that is devoted toward toward seedlings, you know freshly grown seedlings that are just their individual seedlings. But along the way if we do find something that's really good, well then we want to we want to propagate that and make a few more clones of that single vine so that we can learn more how how well it can produce itself in a wine or how it can grow on a different soil type among on the property. So we do have a good I guess maybe it's five to ten percent of the proper property is devoted to what we would term second test vines or maybe even production vineyard where you can grow more vines and you can see what this one vine looks like when you have four vines in a row versus just the one vine sitting out there next to all its neighbors. And so among that we can we can do a little bit of research with that stuff. We don't we don't by any means have like acres of any one variety at the most we might have 30 vines of Itasca or we got a new grape that's been released recently called Clarion. We probably got like 25 or 30 vines of that guy. All the name varieties we might have similar amount of vines and that allows us to see what it does on different sites and gives us a little bit of an idea of how how it can be made into a bigger batch of wine but it's still small scale compared to what most people would get used to like having a half an acre or an acre worth of vines right so okay and you know years ago we did no no no go ahead well I was just I was just gonna mention I mean years ago we did put in our own vineyard and we did a trial um for my own learning um at my parents farm but that uh you know it got to be a lot of work and it was about a hundred miles to get there and we uh my parents ended up doing more work than they wanted to do so we eventually after ten years um kind of scrapped that but along the way I learned a lot about how these things grow on a larger scale but now you're talking you're talking about um clarion yeah I I'm not familiar with that grape yeah uh so clarion is a new variety actually it's an old variety it's an old one that was kicking around our vineyards for a long long time it came close to getting named once or twice um almost pulled the trigger on it but then there was that polar vortex in 2014 and it it did not show itself very well through that and instead not many didn't no but the the grape that was Minnesota 1285 at that time showed itself really well and that became Ikasca at that moment. Yeah and so we went with that guy. But then years later um through some of our collaborations with other universities we realized that this this uh clarion grape which became known as clarion um was performing pretty nicely a little ways south from us. So it He was doing well in in Iowa. Um people were liking it in Indiana. I mean, he was making good wines in other places. And so we decided maybe we should just release this for these guys that are just a little bit southern from us, a little tier warmer, maybe a zone five type of a grape. And it does still grow for us in zone four. Um, but you have to be you have to realize you have to know when to expect winter injury on this guy the further north you go. So it makes a delightful, really crisp, unique kind of a wine. Um that has like notes of white or red. Yeah, it's a white, it's a white wine grape, and we always think of it as reminiscent a little bit of some of the whites that you would encounter in the roan. So slightly nutty character, okay. Like like a ro like a roussan or a marsan, but also has a nice a nice ginger note to it, a little bit of um like I would say it's not quite piney, but it has this characteristic that makes you think it's got this unique how to describe it. I mean, I guess ginger kind of captures that a little bit. Ginger and nuttiness and then maybe a little bit of um uh uh like er there's some very cool herbal thing about it that I can't quite come to mind right now, but you know, it's it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:29

And so yeah, that's one thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:30

It's been officially released.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:32

That is officially released as of oh let me think, is it 20 2023 or 2024 already? It was released. So it's been out there for a little while. Um kind of slipped under the radar. It we talked about it at certain conferences, and I don't know, it we we we don't promote it as in Minnesota as much as we maybe want to, just because we're we're fearful that we don't want to give growers the wrong impression like this is a bulletproof, hardy variety, but it does make a great wine, and you we we have it thriving in our vineyards. It's just that we have to like recharge those trunks from time to time when we do encounter super cold polar vortex conditions.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:15

Um Do you get the sense going to the conferences in 2025 and 2026 that people are 10 years in or whatever uh figuring out how to make uh super high quality wines with Marquette and Petite Pearl and um Itasca and some of these other grapes? I mean, it's a little bit of an ask to say, you know, I and I I and again I came, you know, we're we're relatively new to the industry. Um, but even early on when I wanted to learn about Petite Pearl and and Marquette, they just a lot of times I had to order these wines and have them shipped out of state, and they just kind of seemed clunky. But more and more you can find uh extremely European, you know, minimal oak, neutral, but just elegant, delicious, um incredible wines from these grapes. Um so my sense is that people are figuring out most importantly how to grow the grapes so they get properly ripened and the acids down so they you don't have an acid bomb in their glass if it's a red wine. Um do you guys uh at the conferences are you seeing the quality of the wines people are making 10 years in or whatever um go up? I mean do you get that sense at all?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:32

Yes, certainly. Um yeah, Scott, I we're we're seeing people like learning learning how to craft these things, you know. Every year it's it's unfortunate that you only get like one shot per year to really like capitalize on on a grape. And when you're a little bit new in the industry or new at your craft, you know, you're not always making the right moves um with that grape. And it just takes experience and it takes time for people to to grasp the full potential of these grapes. And now, granted, like not all years are gonna be stellar, so you end up getting a few duds or like. You bet. But all in all, I mean, you can you can smooth that over with different types of and I don't want to like promote so much blending, but I do appreciate when taking taking Itasca, for example, and just giving it a little pop with something a little bit more aromatic to uh to lift those notes and bring it into another light. It doesn't even take that much all the time. I mean, you can be way less than 10% of an uh some kind of an addition of a nice aromatic thing to make another grape sort of stand and pop in a in a nice way. And similar with the red, you know, there's there's lots of different methods to do this winemaking with all these different reds that are at our hands. But you have to have you have to have a good year and you have to have a good like grower and you have to have a good winemaker and you have to have a good palette to recognize. And so it takes a lot of takes a lot of like expertise really to get all that stuff to line up correctly, you know. And when the stars do align, I mean, you know it when it tastes I've had Marquettes out there and petite pearls that are like, wow, this this could stand right up to some of those nicest Pinot that you're gonna find in Oregon or anywhere, you know. So it it's pretty cool what they the capability that these grapes have under the right circumstances.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:27

Right on. Yeah. I definitely believe that for sure. I mean, um and and yeah, I mean, on the right year, uh you know, it's it's either that or we're making rose, right? Because uh we're not adding sugar to our our brittle-aged reds, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:43

Yes, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:44

And we are definitely last question. Are you are are you sort of weird?

unknown 1:11:49

Oh god.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:50

No, no, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:52

No, I was just I was just gonna mention, I mean, and maybe you're hitting on this question or something, but we're certainly looking at more reds that are available. We've got our eye on a couple of really nice gems out in the field at the moment, and we're hoping that something pans out in the near future with those reds. And also on top of that, right on we're playing around with a lot of um seedless table grapes at the moment. So there's a handful of those that have come online. Maybe just within the past year, there's this whole series of um glow, it's called the glow series. So there's three table grapes that we've released just in the last year that are now available for people to grow. Um so those those varieties I can lift off the names if you're interested, but they're they're pretty interesting in their flavors.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:41

Sounds interesting. And then and then I did want to ask. Yeah, I did want to ask finally. Um, are you still growing Gewerts on the J trellis system? Do you guys have any Bonifera going there? Or have you finally waved the white flag and like, nah, you know what? Hybrids only.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:59

No, no, of course. We've got we've got those vinifera, we've got this one um portion of a vineyard that's maybe a quarter acre. It's five rows, maybe nine or ten panels long each row. And in there we've got dotted at least a hundred and twenty, maybe a hundred and fifty different vinifera types of grapes. So that Gewürz truminer still does exist on that J vine system. So we can, in fact, in Minnesota grow these vines, these vinifera types, these tender vines, with a special system where you have to grow the trunk like a J from the ground up to that first midwire, and then you we usually use cane pruning with this system. Um, but every year the vine has to be pruned in the fall and laid down to the ground again and covered with straw before the cold, cold winter hits it. And in this method, we're uh we we can get away with growing Chardonnay, Gewurzchaminer, um, Riesling. We've got some mencia grapes, we've got you know, a whole host of we've got all the regular um vinifera that everybody knows about, but then we've got you know dozens of other ones that are more obscure. And it's kind of fun. It's we call it our little spice block because it gives us a good impression of what these grapes would taste like if we can actually grow them and ripen them, you know. And of course, yeah, Minnesota. It's Minnesota, so we're that you know, we're we're verging on like 2,500 to maybe 3,000 growing degree days if we're lucky. This that's not where Cabernet likes it, you know. Cabernet likes 4,000, 4,500 growing degree days, but um, we can still get an impression of what those things taste like.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:44

But it doesn't die. I mean, that's that's the key thing. You're you're proving that um with a little ingenuity you can you can still make it happen. I was always just so impressed. Um but anyways, well listen, uh John, thank you so much for rejoining me. And again, um as a grape grower here in Indiana, um, you know, the Marquette and the Fronnack um in particular, I task I'm making some of that this year, um, coming from the Country Heritage Vineyard in Leota, which is outside of Fort Wayne. They have the biggest vineyard in Indiana now, over 100 acres. Um, they are big proponents of they they grow Lecrescent, they grow Frontenac Greed, they grow Frontenac Blanc, they grow Marquette. Um, I was able to source all of those from them, and that wouldn't be possible without the work that you guys have done there. So um it's been great being able to stay in touch with you, and I appreciate your time. Um I always love talking about this stuff. I'm I'm thankful and happy to catch up with you, and I I wish you the best this this growing season and and for warmer weather.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:45

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Likewise, Scott. It's great catching up with you. And being that you are in Indiana, maybe check that thing out with the clarion grape. I mean, just throw a couple of vines in the ground and see how they do for you, and it might actually pan out.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:59

Yeah. Yeah. Uh I'm always always open to trying something. Uh, we've got uh several different varieties planted for that for that very reason. So again, I appreciate it. I hope our paths crossed again very soon, and I I wish you the best of luck, my friend.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:13

You bet, dude.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:14

All right, take care. All right, take care, John. See ya.

unknown 1:16:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:19

Bye. All right. Thank you so much, John, for being on the show. Really appreciate you uh graciously uh donating your time to talk to us to learn some things about co climate viticulture. A lot of really cool stuff coming up. I've done some really great interviews recently. Summers around the corner, just getting started. Lots of really cool stuff to appreciate you being here. Come check out the documents.