Cheers Kansas!
Kansas vintners celebrate a bounty of a crop
5:35 p.m. Tuesday, July 29, 2008
A recent Kansas quarterly meeting stressed for the state to coerce Kansans to try more Kansas wine. This year's bumper crop of grapes may just do the trick.
"It takes quality grapes to make good wine," said Ray Campbell, owner of Campbell's Winery in Holton.
Good grapes are not always easy to come by. Unlike corn and soybeans, a grape crop can be potentially destroyed year-round. Ray and Becky Cambell say that while Kansas is a great place to grow grapes, nature, on the other hand, can be quite unfriendly.
"They'll grow here, but they don't like that 20 degrees one day, and 50 the next; and then back to 20," Ray said.
And because Kansas is situated well inland, with flat terrain, temperature extremes can wreak havoc on grape vines nearly every season; especially late-fall, winter and early-spring. There is an old saying that "an early spring is worth nothing" in the Midwest. The hard freeze of April 2007 was a great example.
"When we had the freeze, about a year ago, it got the first bud, and so you lost about half the crop," Ray said.
And the freeze was a double-edged sword for grape farmers' in Kansas because wildlife lost much of their natural sources of food too.
"Because they did not have the fruit to eat, they came and ate the green grapes, and we did not even have [the grapes] netted. So a lot of people in Kansas lost a ton of grapes, just last year, from birds eating them green," Becky said.
Like any farmer, severe weather season hits the grape crop hard. Ray says wind and hail damage can amount to enormous losses.
"Last year we had one of our growers that lost everything to hail," Ray said.
But even though life on the farm is a gamble, it is bumper crop year's that the Campbell's, and the many Kansas wineries that have sprung up over the last five years, take great pride in.
And, like many Kansas farmers', are happy to share their bounty with the rest of us. Cheers Kansas!
Directions:
To get to Campbell's Winery, take HWY 75 to Holton. Go east about six miles, on HWY 116, outside the city limits. Campbell's Winery is on the north side of HWY 116.
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