Weather impacted this year’s local grape crop
ELIZABETHTOWN, NC (WWAY) — Wine lovers listen up! Lu Mil Vineyard and Winery is just about finished harvesting this year’s muscadine grape crop.
It will be months until those grapes turn into wine, but the season was not as great as what farmers hoped for.
Owner Ron Taylor says the grapes started growing in May, and says they’ve since been at the mercy of mother nature.
“It was not as good as we probably liked,” Taylor said. “We were influenced a lot by the weather, by the storms, by the wind, you know there was a late frost this year, and we lost some grapes to that.”
He adds even the hot summer temperatures and tropical systems like Hermine played a role.
“An excellent grow would grown 7-8 tons per acre and we probably had between 4-5 tons this year,” Taylor said. “It could have been a lot worst.”
Taylor said he only had a short window of a few weeks to harvest during this time of the year.
“We got to pick out wine and juice grapes somewhere around Labor Day,” Taylor said. “We get in there with a machine. Again, we wait for a happy medium of ripeness so that we have a good and proper sugar brix in them to make a good product.”
It will only take about a month to make juice, but nearly six months before you’ll see these grapes as wine on the shelves.
“Things that affected our yield this year I feel like are totally different than what has affected us in the past,” Taylor said.
He says caring for a winery is a year-round task.
“It’s farming,” Taylor said. “It’s agriculture. We will doing soil tests pretty immediately and see what our soils need in different fields. We will prune as soon as the leaves begin to fall off after the first frost. We will start pruning our vines and that takes a long time.”
He says as soon as you finish up one season, you’re on to the next.
“It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of coordination and you have to keep good records,” Taylor said.
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