This study represents a preliminary effort to investigate site selection in the Finger Lakes district. More detailed research is in progress.
The New York grape industry has undergone substantial change in the last twenty five years. In the 1960’s the industry main focus was the production of processing grapes mainly Concord for dessert wines, jams and juices. However, since the late 1970’s there has been a shift towards planting of vinifera and hybrid grapes for the production of premium and ultra-premium table wines. The total tonnage of vinifera grapes increased from under 500 tons in 1981 to about 3,500 tons in 1995. The number of wineries has increased from 10 in 1970 to 110 in 1995. Varieties in current demand are less well adapted than traditional ones. In New York State the principal site selection factor is for sites that avoid exposure to extreme low temperatures. This is determined by both regional climate and local conditions including topography, which influences cold air drainage. Other important factors are slope, length of growing season, favorable weather during harvest and soil suitability. More information on the grape industry in New York State is available.
In the Finger Lakes the history of wine making dates back to 1829 when William Botswick planted some vines in his rectory garden. The first recorded shipment of grapes outside the locale was to New York City in 1847. The primary area of development was Keuka Lake where by 1860 there were 200 acres of grapes and 25,000 acres by the end of the century. A secondary centre of development was around Naples on the southern end of Lake Canandaigua. The prohibition era delt a severe blow to the wine industry and the number of wineries fell from seventeen to four. After world war two the outlook for the industry improved. There were several reasons for this. The planting of french-american hybrids became widespread in the region. There was also a move towards the planting of Vitis vinifera the European grapenvine. Previously it had been supossed that conditions in the Finger Lakes were too harsh for its cultivation. The failure of vinifera cultivars was largely due to a pest of the roots Phyloxera and the use of native american rootstocks overcame this problem. The arrival of Konstantin Frank from the Ukraine in 1952 was also a catalyst for the development of vinifera in the region. His expereince with growing vinifera under much harsher conditions in the Ukraine was important in demonstrating that it could thrive in the Finger Lakes region with proper care. The development of new wineries has been largely round Seneca and Cayuga Lakes. A review by Newman contains more information on the subject. Additional information is available from industry web pages.
Site selection has long been recognized as an important facet of successful grape and wine production and consequently much attention has been devoted to it by growers and scientists alike. Requirements for site selection have been summarized in extension bulletins (Jordan et al. 1980) or literature reviews (Dry and Smart 1990). Other researchers have taken site selection to the useful stage by publishing maps of vineyard site suitability. These include studies in British Columbia (Davis et al. 1984), Ontario (Sayed, 1970), Germany (Becker 1988) and Oregon (Aney 1974). Climatic maps (e.g. degree days, frost free days, extreme temperatures) can be produced by interpolation of records from surrounding weather stations and often the use of regression analysis to account for the influence of elevation or aspect. The task may now be simplified because of the commercial availability of digital climatic data sets. Final site suitability for grapevines are produced by categorizing suitability for each soil or climate map into a number of classes and then overlaying these classes to produce a final rating. In recent years, spatial databases known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been developed that greatly increase the ease with which spatial data may be both stored and analyzed. The development of GIS has been accompanied by an increasing trend towards the availability of digital data sets. Data for soils, land use, elevation is now readily available off the internet at scales of 1:250,000. Despite this studies using GIS for site selection have been relatively few. Soderstrom and Magnusson (1995) used GIS to map the agroclimatology of a region in Sweden.
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