Most grape growers in Michigan and Wisconsin have little to complain about this growing season, both reporting a good year with limited challenges. “Quality was average and quantity was above average,” says Tyson Lemon, Regional VP of Sales and Customer Relations for GreenStone.
It was a phenomenal season, according to Craig Carpenter, president of the Wisconsin Grape Growers Association, who grows eight varieties of wine grapes on 12 acres just 20 miles southeast of Madison, Wisconsin. “It’s really the best season I’ve ever had, but there were some notable things throughout,” he adds.
There are more than 13,000 vineyard acres in Michigan, and most of them contain juice-making grapes, such as Niagara and Concord. Nearly 4,000 acres are devoted to more than 50 varieties of wine grapes, both vinifera (old-world grapes like Riesling, Pinot Noir, Merlot, and Pinot Grigio) and hybrid (a cross between vinifera and native grapes).
Wisconsin’s grape industry is 95% focused on wine grapes.
There are 167 commercial grape growers in the state, with 156 permitted wineries in Wisconsin, up about 35% from five years ago. “That is mellowing some now,” Carpenter says.
Wisconsin wineries vary greatly in size and wine producing capacity. The smallest wineries reported average tankage capacity of just under 600 gallons, while the largest wineries had capacity over 100 times greater, according to the latest USDA survey.
Michigan Wine Grape Outlook
Wine grapes have glided through the last four to five years relatively unscathed, for the most part, says Lemon. “That’s a bit unusual, because we don’t usually have the quality and the quantity that consistently,” he says.
It has created a bit of a surplus of wine grapes, which has affected demand. “It’s tougher to sell wine grapes this year than in the past because most everyone is full.”
While the glut has affected demand, Lemon says he hasn’t seen it press down on the retail or the bulk price of wine, at this point.
“A lot of larger wineries have contracts with growers, but if you don’t have a contract, finding a home for them is much more difficult because tanks are full of good wine,” he adds.
Lemon is involved in the ownership of his family’s winery and farm, two distinct operations. The 200-acre farm includes 180 acres of wine grapes, including vinifera and cold-tolerant, hybrid varieties, some offering higher yields and more disease resistance.
“We grow way more grapes than what we need – utilizing only about 20% of what we grow,” he says. “So, we sell grapes to small and large wineries. In the realm of Michigan and the Midwest, we’re a large wine grape grower and a small winery.”
To deal with excess grapes, the family farm has left some grapes on the vine, waiting for a freeze and the exact temperature to harvest the grapes for ice wine.
Ice wine spreads out the season and presents an opportunity for an increased value. “You lose volume, but you add value,” Lemon says.
Being a grape farmer is different than being a wine maker or winery, he emphasizes.
Michigan’s cooler summer – some speculate related to Canadian wildfire smoke – was in sharp contrast to the rest of the county recording record high temperatures in the dead of summer.
“Wine grapes like hot, dry summers,” Lemon says. “It can be too hot, but generally speaking hot and dry weather reduces disease pressure.”
The dry spell was replaced with continuous rains in late summer and late fall, creating challenges with powdery and downy mildew. “We had to keep spraying,” Lemon says.
As the economy struggles, Lemon thinks the winery market may cool some, as discretionary spending is reduced. “We might sell a little less wine,” he says. “We don’t generally lose consumers, but their tastes may change according to what they can afford.”
That said, as an industry, wine makers are continually focused on creating better wines. “I would love to see the industry transition from a fruity wine base to more sophisticated dry reds and whites,” he says. “We are slowly getting there, which is what Lemon Creek focuses on.”
On the farm, Lemon says the environment is stable – not expanding or contracting.
“We may be going into a period of slight weakness coming off a period of strength,” he says. “We will weather the storm, along with the other well-established businesses in this industry.”
Juice Grapes
Juice grapes struggled early finding sugar, but yields were good, Lemons says. “Finding the right brix early was challenging.”
Jon Hinkelman, district commissioner for the National Grape Cooperative, agrees, saying the average brix for Michigan was 15.87 this year, off from its normal of 16 brix. Lesser growing degree days may be attributed to wildfire smoke. “We did have a bloom date two days earlier than usual, which is normally a really good thing – an earlier bloom date, you make more brix. But this year that wasn’t the case,” he explains.
The cooperative of about 650 family farmers across American, and Ontario, Canada, owns Welches. About 110 Michigan members brought in a bountiful 50,000 tons of concord grapes on about 6,500 acres in the state in 2023. In total, the cooperative brought in another large crop of a little over 300,000 tons, according to Hinkelman, who farms grapes and grain in Berrien and VanBuren counties, including 600 acres of juice grapes and 15 acres of contracted wine grapes.
While large crops in the past have sent grower prices tanking, in recent years Welches has created monumental change by creating the Voluntary Surrender Program, allowing the co-op to buy out members wanting to downsize. It has better aligned supply and demand and improved grower prices.
“We’ve gone from $220 a ton, to now closer to $480 a ton,” says Hinkelman, also noting that the pandemic turned out to be a positive for the grape industry. “People went back to comfort food like peanut butter and jelly and were reintroduced to Welches and its products,” he adds, while noting that the company continues to look at all aspects of the business to keep it more profitable.
Labor continues to be a challenge, with growers trying to mechanize as much as possible. The H2A program (a federal, migrant labor program) has put a bottom-line underneath what local people are willing to work for, Hinkelman points out. “Wages have gone up exponentially, and along with that, our inputs – chemicals and fertilizers – have hit double-digit inflation. But, labor is a pinch point,” he says.
Wisconsin Outlook
There was a span of a little over five weeks where Wisconsin grape growers were denied rain in June. The fruit was set, but it still needed moisture to keep foliage fresh and berries plump, explains Carpenter, whose oldest vines are 11 years old. “I’m getting to the point where 75% of the vineyard is relatively mature and producing quality fruit,” he says. “The good thing with mature vines, their root structure is about equivalent to what is above ground – about 4-to-6 feet deep,” he says. “Plants were getting stressed, but they find their way to moisture. And then we started getting almost an inch of rain a week for the remainder of the growing season.”
Carpenter backed off from his fungicide program during that period of dryness, but says they developed some fungus and, going forward, will continue spraying whether it’s dry or not.
This was the latest harvest Carpenter has had since he’s been growing grapes. “We had a hot summer with a lot of 90-degree days, which is usually good, but with the lack of moisture and the late bloom, it pushed out harvest about two weeks because it took us a little longer to get the brix level up,” he says. “It makes it harder to find labor and the possibility of frost looms.”
Wisconsin also has a glut of wine grapes. Carpenter left three acres hang to make ice wine, but virtually no grapes were left with birds taking out about 14,000 pounds of grapes. “Next year if we want ice wine, we will be netting,” he says.
Like other Wisconsin growers, Carpenter is doing more with table grapes, producing 2,500 pounds of table grapes last year. “We’ll push that even more this next year, as you get twice as much for a table grapes,” he adds.
