By Dan Rahn
University of Georgia
With the fall harvest set to begin, Georgia muscadine growers
are
warily eyeing Tropical Storm Katrina, hoping the tropical season
will be kinder to them this year than last.
“We had three storms last year, and they cost us about half of
our crop,” said Charles Cowart, owner of Still Pond Vineyards
near Arlington, Ga. “We don’t need any more of that.”
Cowart said he had planned to begin harvesting his 160 acres of
muscadine grapes this week. “But they’re just not ripening,” he
said. “We’ve put it off now until the first of next week.”
As Katrina began threatening south Florida, the Georgia
muscadine
crop was looking good. “We’ve got a better-than-average crop,”
Cowart said. “The sugars are low, but we’ve got some pretty
fruit, large fruit.”
No problem
The low sugar content isn’t a problem, he said. “If everybody
else had high sugars and we were the only ones around with low
sugars, it might be a problem,” he said. “But in a high-moisture
season, everybody’s got low sugars. That’s just a given.”
The rainy summer, he said, will just “make the sugar man happy.”
Some sugar has to be added to any muscadine juice being
fermented
into wine. The lower the sugar content, the greater the need for
added sugar.
The summer’s abundant rainfall has created a more serious
potential problem, though: a high risk for tropical storm
damage.
The crop just can’t handle a lot of rain right now.
“It would split a lot of grapes,” Cowart said. “There’s just so
much water they can hold, and they can’t go beyond that. The
grapes are ripening now, and if we get a lot of rain now they’ll
take up more water than they can hold.”
Wind damage
High winds could hurt the crop, too, said Paul Wigley, the
University of Georgia Cooperative Extension coordinator in
Calhoun County.
“High winds can put a bunch of grapes on the ground,” Wigley
said. “And once the grapes hit the ground, you can’t use them in
juices or wines.”
Cowart, who makes juice and wine products with all of his
muscadine crop, said Tropical Storm Frances hit his farm with 50
to 60 mile-per-hour winds in early September last year and shook
off a lot of his grapes.
“The grapes aren’t as ripe now as they were with Frances,” he
said. The heavier the grapes, the more susceptible they are to
being blown off their vines by high winds.
Georgia has about 1,200 commercial acres of muscadines. The crop
begins ripening in August in south Georgia. The harvest moves
northward through the upper piedmont area, where it ends in
early
October.
Many Georgia gardeners grow muscadines as a backyard fruit. UGA
Extension experts figure the state has probably twice as many
backyard muscadines as commercial acres. Your county UGA
Extension agent can tell you how to grow them.
(Dan Rahn is a news editor with the University of Georgia
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
