Cooper's Hawk Vineyards hand-picks grapes after another bad winter

An area winery will keep the machines in the garage and get down in the dirt to harvest this year's grape crop.

Most of the high-hanging grape stock at Cooper's Hawk Vineyard died during the brutally-cold winter in 2014-15, but buds buried under the snow were able to survive.

Cooper's Hawk owner Tom O'Brien and a group of 12 extra employees were picking the grapes by hand Wednesday. Grown less than a metre above ground, these grapes are too low for the harvesters to reach.

O'Brien will be supplementing these grapes withgrapes from Niagara.But he'll still see his production decrease by two-thirds and he'll be losing$400,000 this yearsince he can't raise prices.

"The wine market is a global market," O'Brien said. "We're still competing against the likes of Chile, Europe, Australia and California. They have lots of grapes, so no our prices don't change."

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O'Brien says other growers found the same thing.

Aleksander Bemben, who owns the Aleksander Estate Winery in Ruthven, said he just finished handpicking his grapes.

"February was very cold," Bemben said. "Anything under the ground, under the snow was able to grow, we had some buds there."

This year's harvest brought in four tonnes of grapes, marking a rebound to harvest levels from two years ago, Bemben said.

"This year was very good, we had four tonnes. Last year we didn't have any grapes," Bemben said.

Despite this harvest, the winter devastated some local grape stocks.

Researchers at Brock University found that some grape varieties in the Colchester region, like chardonnay, merlot and sauvignon blanc had survival rates lower than 10 per cent.

For the grapes that did survive, O'Brien said more work was needed to keep them growing.

Since they were lower to the ground, these grapes required more pruning and spraying than usual to keep them alive.

O'Brien said the fact that there's anything at all to harvest is good news.

CBC Windsor's Radio-Canada colleague Edith Drouin got some video of the hand-picking process.