The Great Lakes (not The Finger Lakes, as that is always swill) region should be making world class wine in the '19 vintage. In spring, we had a ton of rain and it was early with no frosts followed by a hot dry summer. It’s in the 90’s and mostly dry until at least the first week of October. A very ‘Mediterranean’ climate so far this year. Give some '19 pinot noir, cab franc, and chardonnay from the Niagara Bench Escarpment and some Michigan riesling a try. If a certain orange person should do well again, I might just move to the Okanagan Valley.
One of the challenges will be to turn vineyards into ‘dry farmed’ if possible - but this is not always possible. If there is not enough rain and the groundwater is not plentiful enough, the vines will not survive.
Anyone have and info on wineries in ‘warmer climates’ that are dry farming - or have shifted to dry farming over the past decade? I believe Tablas did - anyone know of others?
Ohio was actually the leading wine producing state in the Union before California and prohibition. One of my favorite defunct wineries in Ohio was Kinkead Ridge, whose owner came to Adams County, Ohio as they have the closest soils compositions to Bordeaux, outside of France.
That claim was from Kinkead’s owners, Ron Barret and Nancy Bentley, who sold their lauded Oregon vineyards and came to edge of the Ohio River with a mission – make wines worthy of the area’s lost fame. If national and international press is the metric, they succeeded. Their whites were always strong and their red Bordeaux blend, Revelation, has been Ohio’s top wine in every Ohio vs Michigan Wine Clash:
Kinkead was sold to someone who didn’t know what they were doing, the vines froze, and it is now a soybean field. It still exists but the grapes come from Cali, and it is now plonk. Meranda-Nixon in the same area makes good wine. I’d suggest their Norton to any Norton haters:
I was wondering how they could avoid Pierce’s disease in Ohio - it’s said that every winter, you need at least three consecutive nights with low temperatures at 15F in order to reliably kill all of the Leaf Hopper eggs.