Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Ninety-nine (ish) bottles of wine on the wall—er, in a walk-in refrigerator at the Arboretum.
Ninety-nine (ish) bottles of wine on the wall—er, in a walk-in refrigerator at the Arboretum.
Drew Horton was following his winemaking dream in California about 12 years ago, working with pinot noir grapes in Santa Barbara and scouring winejobs.com for his chance to move up from an assistant winemaker.
Then “up popped an ad from a new winery in Minnesota, and it talked about new Minnesota cold-hardy grapes,” Horton recalls. “Up until that point, I thought only God made grapes. I had no idea that the University of Minnesota was deeply involved.”
Horton figured he could be one of the first winemakers to work with new grapes—or stay in Santa Barbara and continue helping to make “oceans” of pinot noir. Horton bought a big coat and a pickup truck and hoped for the best.
The University of Minnesota is one of three universities in the United States with large grape breeding programs that use genetic testing. Although these hybrid grapes have long been shunned by traditional winemakers in California and Europe, the grapes grown here may help winemaking worldwide survive climate change. U of M researchers can pinpoint grapes that will be resistant to disease and carry certain flavor characteristics through DNA testing, then test the best candidates for cold hardiness through trial and error. The team can also fine-tune the architecture of the grapes themselves to better withstand extreme weather events: looser clusters and thicker skins allow air to flow through the bunches to cut down on mold, rot, fungus, and invasive insects.
The wine grape breeding program began here in the 1970s when many states were getting into local wine production. Back then, there were only two wineries in the state. To date, the U has produced 12 “keeper” grapes that have been released; a 13th is awaiting patent. The state now boasts approximately 80 wineries; about six years ago, the industry was valued at over $80 million. But until recently, few winemakers in Minnesota were making drinkable wine, at least in Horton’s opinion.
“When I got to Minnesota, the wines were atrocious,” he says, although he concedes that “there were a few that weren’t the worst thing.”
That first year, he was worried something was wrong with the grapes. Now he attributes the poor taste to inexperienced winemaking. Since joining the U team as an enology specialist in 2016, Horton has made it part of his mission to elevate the skills of winemakers across the state.
In The Fields
When Matt Clark, associate professor of grape breeding and enology at the U, stretches out his arms, he’s about the size of a grapevine: six feet tall with a six-foot wingspan. On a June afternoon, he leads us into the 12 acres of grapevines at the Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, where he serves as director of research. Leaves are just beginning to spread on the vines and flowers starting to bloom from new shoots.
Some of the grape flowers that are developing specific seeds are wrapped in paper bags so pollen from elsewhere in the field doesn’t get mixed in. At any given time, there are 10,000 unique grape plants growing here. A thousand of them are new every year. On average, one out of the 10,000 possibilities will become an official new variety.
“We’re constantly planting, selecting, and killing,” says Clark.
The process is extremely labor-intensive: Each plant is unique, so each requires slightly different care, says Colin Zumwalde, a seasonal employee who is stapling vines to trellises today. The plants also require pruning by hand—in February.
DNA testing helps speed things up: By testing seedlings, “you can make assumptions on traits like disease resistance,” says Clark.
But there’s no DNA test for cold hardiness. The only way to test whether a grapevine will survive the winter is to plant it, then wait and see.
The researchers turn the most promising survivors into micro-batches of wine, using identical procedures each time, storing them in beer bottles with caps in walk-in refrigerators. The team of five tastes about 12 wines every week (squelching the fun by holding the tastings at 10 am on Wednesdays and spitting every sip). If they find one that seems promising, they assign it a number. As of mid-June, they were up to number 1,426 since the numbering system started in the early 1980s, starting with MN1001. They also test the grapes that are promising enough to be made into wine by spinning them in an auto titrator machine that quantifies the grape’s acidity. Testing acidity by tasting is cumbersome, Clark says, because “our mouths get fatigued when tasting grapes high in acidity. You could taste one bad one, and the day is ruined.”
Minnesota wines have a reputation as sweet, Clark explains, because most of the grapes grown here have high acidity, tempting winemakers into adding sugar to balance the acid. Creating a grape with lower acidity means the amount of sugar can be reduced. The Itasca grape that was released in 2017, for example, is a third lower in acidity than the Frontenac Gris, which was released in 2003. The researchers are hoping to create grapes with still lower acidity that would match the typical level of a chardonnay. And the team has high hopes for its newest grape, MN1220, which has lower acidity than Itasca and has been dubbed Clarion.
“There’s a town in Iowa called Clarion, and the wine is clear and bright, like the clarion call of trumpets,” Clark says, describing the taste as “floral without being fruity,” with notes of citrus and grass. “Also, it doesn’t have any other real meaning, and it’s easy to pronounce and spell.”
Already, he says, the team is hearing complaints about the seemingly perfect name.
But the team liked the wine it produced so much that they kept it even though they expect it to grow better in slightly warmer climates, like Iowa and Wisconsin.
Future Of Winemaking Worldwide
The first winery in Minnesota belonged to David Bailly—Alexis Bailly Vineyard near Hastings. A wine enthusiast, Bailly made a discovery on a trip to France: Friends in the Loire Valley were crossing their grapes with a wild variety of the same species native to Minnesota. The winemakers were using it to combat cold and disease and an invasive bug. At one point, the French government banned wine made from American grapes, however, claiming the foreign fruit made the wine taste like raspberries, and certain grape varieties are still banned.
But now, even France is loosening its strict regulations, anticipating that climate change could continue to prompt smaller yields. Last year showed the consequences of extreme weather conditions in dramatic fashion when the country lost more than $2 billion in sales in its smallest harvest since 1957. 60 Minutes interviewed one vineyard owner who didn’t yield a single bottle of Champagne. Now, bottles of Bordeaux are allowed to include non-Bordeaux grapes in their wine.
Traditional winemaking regions are also looking for ways to survive climate change.
In Napa, where fires have rocked winemaking, some are de-alcoholizing their wine before bottling it, as excessive heat increases the alcohol content.
“You can either move north or plant different grapes,” Horton says of his California peers. “There are things you could do in the vineyard to a limited extent to alleviate the heat extremes, but the more direct path is to sell the winery and move 200 miles north.”
Extreme weather events have hit other wine-growing regions as well: Australia suffered bush fires in 2019 and 2020, and Italy suffered hailstorms followed by heat waves in 2017 and 2018.
The silver lining may be that weather changes have opened the doors for nontraditional winegrowing regions. Northern regions like England and Oregon’s Willamette Valley are winning acclaim for their pinot noirs and chardonnays.
Future Of Winemaking In MN
That doesn’t mean, though, that Minnesota winegrowers are hoping to become the next Napa. That’s unlikely to happen for a variety of reasons: Traditional wine grapes don’t naturally survive here, the growing season is short, grapevines only grow about 20 years here compared to 80 in California, and the whole process is more expensive.
But it does mean that the quality of wines in Minnesota is expanding and that more Minnesotans are making wine and incorporating new ideas, Nan Bailly says. (Her father, David, returned to Minnesota after that trip to France, planted a vineyard, and kept the vines alive every winter by covering them like rosebushes.)
“These new young winemakers have no hard-and-fast rules,” she says. “People have the freedom to make the styles of wines that they want.” Recent experiments include wines made with white grapes in the style of reds, resulting in an orange-colored wine.
Winemaking can also extend the interest of agricultural careers to new generations that may not be eager to keep up the traditional family farm, Horton says. Grapes make about three times as much money as corn (and can be planted on hillsides unsuitable for traditional Minnesota crops), he says—and if you add yeast and turn it into wine, you can multiply that by another 10.
“You plant three or four acres, send your kid off to get a chemical or food science degree, and you’ve kept the family farm and diversified your family enterprise,” he says.
Of course, Minnesota isn’t immune to climate change challenges. Colder-than-usual and warmer-than-usual winters can pose challenges for the research team, and extreme wind and rainstorms can damage the grapes.
Horton is still waiting for his California winemaking friends to call to ask to sample a bottle of made-in-Minnesota wine. Ninety-nine percent of them still think he’s crazy, he says, but he insists that now is the time for people to give Minnesota grapes a try.
And he’s not the only one. The Frontenac grape got a recent shout-out in The New York Times, and Minnesota wineries recently won a Best of Show and several Best of Class awards at the annual International Cold Climate Wine Competition, with 10 states and Canada participating. The team is even working with a partner in Europe to get Itasca grapevines imported there.
Even if Minnesota isn’t the next Bordeaux, there’s one European tradition that Bailly thinks the state should replicate. “In Europe, you drink the local wine,” she says. “Recognizing your neighbors and being proud of what’s being produced locally is super important.”
