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WineEast Grapegrowing Beating Mother Nature at Her Own Game How growers can control environmental factors using high-tunnel technology By Richard Carey Tunnels are set up at Cramers��� Nursery in Mount Joy, Pa., to demonstrate their effectiveness protecting vines and other crops from eastern conditions. T hose of you who have followed my columns know that I usually discuss interesting and different ways to make better wines, more efficiently and more consistently. You may not have known that I came to winemaking as a plant physiologist. I became fascinated with the chemistry of wine in graduate school and proceeded to ferment anything I could in the course of getting my degree. So it is from the plant physiologist���s perspective that I am now writing about one of the most important aspects of winegrowing: how to get grapes to the best physiological maturity and at the highest sustainable yield. When that goal is achieved, growers make the most money and have the most incentive to give winemakers the best-quality grapes to make into wine. I have been making wine on the East Coast for 17 years. I know that making high-quality, world-class wines from eastern fruit is possible. The challenge, however, is to make those wines in the East on a regular basis. Haygrove High Tunnels are one growing method vineyard owners can employ to 60 W in es & V i ne s M AR C H 20 13 WineEast HIGHLIGHTS: ��� Three-season tunnels help control environmental factors, and that control produces higher quality wines. ��� After his experiment, the author found that tunnels minimize spring and fall frost damage, and fewer sprays are needed. ��� In the experiment, the growing sea son was extended and harvest yields were increased. mitigate some of the environmental variations that are prevalent in the East. The eastern winegrape-growing environment is often characterized by late spring and early fall frosts or freezes, seasonal temperature changes that transition from too warm to too cold too quickly for the vines to adapt, a lot of rain (often occurring at inappropriate times), an abundance of cloudy days, less diurnal fluctuation in day versus nighttime temperatures and high humidity that allows many diseases to attack the vines. Tunnels may also be increasingly important in the West as growers explore ways to combat the influences of global warming. Western growers can have more sun than they know what to do with, or have so little rain during the growing season that they get caught off guard when it does happen. Winter temperatures are not cold enough to moderate some diseases, and increasing average temperatures are changing the historic terroir of the wines. In both regions, the overall basic concept is that uniformity of climate is important for fine wine production. This is the main theme of John Gladstones��� book, ���Wine, Terroir and Climate Change,��� and that general concept is also the underlying premise for new vineyard techniques that can be especially beneficial for high-value grape varieties grown in eastern climates. Tunnel background In my years on the East Coast I have observed that many of the tenets I thought were important from a West Coast winemaking perspective were not as true in the East.