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® "After many years of working with conventional chemicals, I simply found a better way." —Bill Powers In 1986, which was to be his first big production year, he was told in April by the winery that although they would honor their grape contract, there were too many grapes in the state and prices would be reduced to $150 per ton. Powers began looking for a more profitable home for his grapes. By July, he decided he needed his own winery to make bulk wine. He'd made cold sales calls to wineries on the East Coast, a region experiencing a short crop due to a harsh winter. Not only did he find some takers back there, but he has kept those long-distance relation- ships through the years and still today sends bulk wine to customers in the East. With the start of harvest only two months away, he had little time to get the paperwork and licensing in place for a new winery. He secured a winery partner and received license and bonding approval in about three weeks— lightning speed for what takes most about three months to accomplish. By the first part of September, he had the legal go-ahead for the winery. The vineyard shop was transformed into a temporary winery with 30,000-gallon stainless steel tanks put in place. However, there hadn't been time to bring in a press to process the grapes. Powers tells that Rob Griffin, wine- maker at the time for Hogue Cellars in Prosser, offered the use of their press equipment—but the press was only available at night. "So, I brought truck-trailers of whole grapes in, pressed the grapes, and then had another truck waiting to haul the grape juice right back." About 1,500 cases of wine were bottled in the winery's first year in 1988. Organic transition Powers made the bold decision in 1987 to go organic in the vineyard and grow grapes without chemicals. Badger Mountain Vineyard became the first certified organic vineyard in the state in 1990. "After many years of working with conventional chemicals, I simply found a better way," he said. But Powers and his son, who served as vineyard man- ager in the early years, had to find that better way pretty much by themselves. "In the late 1980s, nobody within WSU had organic expertise and could help me," he said, but added that Clore gave encouragement and told him 'Sure you can go organic. We were all organic before 1945.'" In the early years, Powers met regularly with the staff of Fetzer Vineyards, an organic and sustainable practices pioneer in California's wine grape industry, to share information. Learning how to make wine without sulfites was even more challenging than growing the grapes organically. Although sulfur dioxide and sulfur agents have been used in food preservation and winemaking for centuries, and the sulfur chemicals are on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list, sulfite agents are taboo in organic wine. "There's no book in the world that can tell you how to make your wine organically without sulfites," Powers said, noting that conventional white wines today have sulfites in the range of 30 to 40 parts per million and red wines around 50 ppm. Wines without sulfites don't keep as long and lose their freshness. To compensate, they've learned to leave wine in storage tanks longer and bottle more frequently, doing smaller bottle runs. • www.goodfruit.com The standard by which all others are measured "My Brother Bill and I farm 300 acres of blueberries here in WIND MACHINES— These machines really work Michigan. We have solid-set irrigation and use water to frost protect, we have four Orchard Rite® Wind Machines to protect where we can't get water (pumping 3,000 gallons of water per minute, we just don't have enough water to cover the farm). We'll often have temperatures around 26 to 28 degrees. With our wind machines, we can gain 3 to 5 degrees. The auto start option has been our sav- ior on cold nights. It just gives me 4 less things to do. I wouldn't buy anoth- er one without autostart. We have nine more Wind Orchard Rite® Machines in partnership operations in Washington and Oregon. I can tell you these machines really work: They've saved a lot of fruit." George and Bill Fritz My Orchard-Rites® Brookside Farms; Gobles, Michigan paid for themselves For nearly two decades, I have been farming vinifera grapes in the Grand River Val- ley of Ohio. Starting with a 2- acre leased field, my family now owns 85 acres and man- ages another 80 acres for three wineries. Today hun- dreds of wind machines dot the east coast fruit region, but back in 1995 when we installed our first machine, nobody was running them. Today we use five machines to move cold air winter and spring in frost/winterkill areas. The original propane machine now has 500 hours and still starts on the first or second crank at sub- zero temperatures. The most commonly asked question about our Orchard Rites® are: 1). Do they work? & 2). How much do they raise the winter low temperature? In our best site, currently protected by one 165hp. unit, the machine protects up to 15 at-risk acres and raises temper- ature 8-12° F. on the coldest January nights when started early. On poorer sites, less temperature increase is to be expected (3-4° F.), although the machines clearly lessen the time that the vineyard spends at the nights lowest temperatures. On a 10 acre site, with wine grapes at $1,500/ton, avoiding a one-time 1.6 tpa loss will cover the initial investment. On any one of the coldest nights between 2003-2005, each Orchard Rite® paid for itself." Gene Sigel South River Vineyard, Grand River Valley, Ohio Let us help you solve your unique frost control needs. 1615 W. Ahtanum • Yakima, WA 98903 • 509-248-8785, ext. 612 For the representative nearest you, visit our website: www.orchard-rite.com GOOD FRUIT GROWER MAY 1, 2012 31