Despite some recent rain, Virginia remains in a drought—the latest insult for vineyards where grape crops were crushed by an early freeze followed by extreme temperatures. WMRA’s Christine Kueter reports.
[clanging glass bottles and hydraulic presses]
They’re bottling red wine at Michael Shaps Winery near Scottsville. The petit verdot grapes—picked two summers ago at Pippin Hill Farm and Vineyards in Albemarle County—were brought here to be crushed, aged, and, now, bottled.
This year’s grape harvest, however, will be far less full-bodied, thanks to an early spring freeze that decimated tender plant buds followed by two months of drought, and, more recently, oppressive heat.
This year, Shaps expects shriveled crop yields and production traffic from their 15 clients they have that grow grapes but don’t make wine, according to Vineyard Manager Christopher Hill. While vineyards with altitudes of 900 feet or higher will harvest marginally more grapes, Hill says—
CHRISTOPHER HILL: A lot of vineyards are below that. And they lost a lot of crop. So the big takeaway from that freeze was that our crop this year is that our crop is going to be diminished a great deal. You’ve gone from four tons an acre to a half-ton an acre at the most, or maybe a quarter of a ton, a quarter of a ton is 500 pounds.
What worries Hill now?
HILL: There’s an old farming expression that goes, ‘Drought will hurt you. Rain will ruin you.’ In some places in the world that do wine, they’ll talk about a vintage for a given region, a pretty large region. Our vintage is from vineyard to vineyard. You can have drastically different rainfall, and therefore drought, just from one farm to another. It could do OK, or it could not rain again, or it could keep on raining and keep on raining until it drowns everything. All of it is still out there, the season is young, it’s Virginia, and the mid-Atlantic states are noted meteorologically for the variability of the weather throughout the year. Right now, I’d say, you know, we can look towards smaller berries, berry size, and maybe an earlier harvest. But it is really too early to call that.
RACHEL STINSON VROOMAN: So, this is our petit verdot block here, and you can see, like . . . I don’t know if this vine even has any grapes on it at all—
Over at Stinson Vineyards in White Hall, Operations Director Rachel Vrooman thrusts her hand into a thick cluster of grape leaves to find fruit. There’s not much.
VROOMAN: The shoots along the cordon are few and far between. And that’s what would bear the fruit. And so you can see on this one, here’s a cluster.
After the spring freeze, the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared a disaster in 104 Virginia counties and cities as of June 26, where losses in fruit crops such as grapes, apples, and cherries are estimated to be between $32 million and $105 million. Farmers across the state are now eligible to apply for emergency low-interest loans over the next eight months.
Vrooman will apply for a $35,000 loan to help cover this season’s labor shortage. She’s also researching more drought-tolerant rootstock varieties to replace the 5% of vines across her seven acres that died this year.
The Stinson Vineyards crew often harvests grapes in early August when they ripen and change color. This year, likely to be their second worst harvest since 2011, all bets are off. Vrooman expects some wine varieties, including her favorite, sauvignon blanc, won’t even be made, given that she expects to harvest 85% fewer grapes this season.
VROOMAN: Yeah, I think you’ll see a lot of that this vintage, is people just getting creative with whatever they have, because, you know, we’re not going to make a very, very small lot of something that we don’t have enough grapes for. You know, it’s not really worth it to make just one barrel of something, so, yeah, I think people will adjust in some creative and fun ways. That’s part of the story!
Hill also predicts 2026 may be a year of blends–
HILL: Which can be terrific, I mean, that can be better than a varietal blend. We’ll just give it a fanciful name, hopefully, appealing name . . . It can be absolute magic.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than one-quarter of Virginia, including Nelson and Albemarle counties, remains under an extreme drought. Despite recent rain in many localities, much of Virginia still needs between 10 and 14 inches of rain to break the water deficit over the coming month.
HILL: You know, in farming, you’re just trying to dance with Mother Nature, you know, and, boy, you are definitely not calling the tune.
Hurricane season, which began June 1, runs through November 30.
