Minnesota’s oldest winery has long had an apropos slogan: “Where the grapes can suffer.” Unfortunately, that catchphrase is proving all too true at Alexis Bailly Vineyards.“I lost 80 percent of my vineyard,” proprietor/winemaker Nan Bailly told me earlier this week.

She’s not sure why. It was a long but not especially cold winter, with decent snow cover during the worst stretches. “It hit 22 below” at the vineyard near Hastings, she said, and “we’ve been in a drought the last 4, 5 years. This year we had ¾ of an inch of rain from snow melt till the 1^st of June.”

Oddly (or maybe not), the grapes that have been developed locally for their cold-hardiness fared worst during the winter. “I lost 90 percent of my Frontenac,” Bailly said. “But my French grapes that my father planted in 1973 have shown no stress. The Marechel Foch and Leon Millet came through no problem.”

Bailly added that she will get a waiver on the Minnesota law that requires wineries to use at least 50 percent state-grown grapes in the overall wine output, until she can get new vines up and going. And I wouldn’t expect her to plant a whole lot more Frontenac, even though her very tasty Voyageurs blend contains about 30 percent Frontenac. “I think Frontenac does better in a warmer climate,” she said. “I think the heat in states like Illinois gives it a juicier fruit flavor.” said Bailly.

That point actually was relevant to the reason I originally had called Nan: the announcement that for the first time, Minnesota would be part of the nation’s largest AVA (American Viticultural Area). The Upper Mississippi River Valley AVA will be cover 29,914 square miles, including some or all of 10 counties in Minnesota, nine in Illinois, 18 in Iowa, and 23 in Wisconsin. It runs from near St. Paul to Moline, Ill., and is 50 times bigger than Bordeaux. The Alexandria Lakes AVA in western Minnesota was established in 2005.

“It’s a pretty broad-reaching area,” said Bailly. “It will be pretty hard to say that grapes being grown in the Hiawatha Valley where we are are like grapes being grown in Galena [Ill.]. But it does highlight that there are winemakers here, or maybe they should be called hobbyists, sufferers, strugglers. That hey, there’s a small burgeoning area where they are growing grapes and making wine.

“We’re still figuring it out here.”

And fighting the good fight, in Bailly’s case.

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For the location and other info on Bailly’s vineyard and 23 other Minnesota wineries, check out our map on the upper-right side of this page.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.