The Fizz #76: If you're growing grapes in New England, you should know Bruce Reisch
Bruce Reisch, head of the Cornell grape breeding program, has brought leading research and 14 grape varieties to growers and winemakers in the USA and beyond.
In this issue, I interview Bruce Irving Reisch, scientist, (recently retired) professor, and head of the grape breeding program at Cornell. Bruce has introduced 14 grape varieties to the world. Before I hit record, we spoke for a bit about my small vineyards here in Maine and the varieties I grow. He mentioned he knows and has met the people who developed every one (except Concord, naturally). Bruce’s contributions to grape breeding likely have touched every grape breeder in New England, and many across the country and the world.
In this issue, we speak about Bruce’s upbringing with plants, how he got into grape breeding, and what he loves about his work. We also get tactical around what grape breeding looks like, how he tests new varieties, and how growers should know which grape to plant where.
Margot: I'd love to learn a little bit about your upbringing. Did you grow up in the Finger Lakes and were grapes a big part of your life?
Bruce Irving Reisch: I guess I loved grapes since I was a child, but I grew up in New York City. Very little knowledge of agriculture. But my dad was a a horticulturist deep down. Wherever we lived, he filled the place with plants. All kinds of plants, including bonsai and every kind of house plant imaginable. When we moved to a place with a terrace, he learned about hydroponics and he built his own hydroponic unit, and I was fascinated by what he was doing.
When I was 16, we moved to our first home, a house on Long Island with one third of an acre. He put in a woodland garden, a Japanese garden, a dwarf conifer garden, a vegetable garden. Then when I started working on grapes, he put in grapes and of course the usual ornamental trees and shrubs, and the rose garden because my mom loved roses. So I had horticulture all around me and his enthusiasm for the plant world rubbed off on me. I was I was a science geek too, growing up, won a science award in middle school at a science fair competition, and it just snowballed from there.
I went to a science oriented high school, so when I wound up at Vassar and then Cornell, I pursued plant related studies. I learned that there was a such thing as plant breeding, which I had no idea where my plants came from. Well, someone has to develop those plants. It seemed like an amazing thing to create new plant varieties.
Margot: Why did you choose grapes?
Bruce: Grapes chose me, but I always loved grapes. At Cornell as a senior, I took a wine appreciation course. We had also a wine tasting group in the dorm. This is when the drinking age was 18. When I went to study for a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, I worked on plant breeding and plant genetics, but more specifically with alfalfa. I learned generally about plant breeding and genetics and how it's done in a variety of crops. But when you're on the job market, there are a couple of jobs with this plant and a couple with another plant and lots with corn or soybeans. There happened to be two jobs on grapes and one of them was in my home state of New York. So grapes chose me.
There was an opening for a grape breeder at Cornell. I was familiar with Cornell and had visited the Geneva experiment station, where I'm located, when I was an undergraduate during the course I was taking in plant breeding. So I knew the place. I was lucky enough to get an interview and very quickly got a job offer. I didn't really have to think twice. I loved grapes, I had some appreciation for wine at the time, home state, well supported program—easy. You get the offer, you accept it, and you go. And I've stayed here for over 43 years. I retired in October.
Margot: I heard about that, congratulations your retirement! What does it mean to breed grapes? I understand from a farmer perspective of like, every year this plant seems more resistant or more cold hardy, so I'll take the cuttings from that plant. But I don't understand what it means in the lab.
Bruce: First of all, it starts with input from people like you, from growers, from people who make a living growing grapes, and also those who buy the grapes. What do they want? We need to hear from the growers. What are your problems? What could new varieties help you with? And we need to hear from the wineries. What do you want? Do you have the right spectrum of varieties? Would you like things that ripen earlier when your equipment is dormant and just sitting there? Would you like things that ripen later? What's missing from the wine spectrum, the grape spectrum? Or table grape growers—what would help you with your operations? What traits are of interest to you?
I often go to grower meetings where I listen and think, okay, is that possible for me to incorporate in the program? Is it not? Then I go through the thought process—how could I get there? What varieties do I have that may have the traits that growers want? How could I incorporate those into wine grapes or table grapes that have really high quality? Whatever quality means—quality is a moving target that means different things to different people.
Do I have good genetic control over those traits? For instance, disease resistance which helps farmers reduce the spray program to enable growers to grow grapes more sustainably and sometimes organically. We know a lot about genes for powdery mildew and downy mildew resistance, and we're beginning to understand phomopsis resistance, black rot resistance, sponge rot resistance. We have a pretty good approach to be able to put all of those into new varieties. We have good testing methods in the field, great testing methods in the lab as well.
I can't just test things in the lab. I really need to test them in the field because the end product is grown in the field. According to lab tests, I might have a grape with three genes for powdery mildew resistance, two for downy mildew resistance. I still want to grow it out in the field and confirm when there's lots of powdery mildew under low or no spray conditions in my experimental vineyards. Do I see powdery mildew? How much? Do I see downy mildew? And if so, how much? Is it tolerable levels? You know, have I made some advances?
This is what it means to me as a breeder, choosing parents that may not be ideal as varieties by themselves, but one parent has one set of traits, another parent another set of traits, can I make a cross between the two of them to find seedlings that have the desirable traits from both parents, but not the undesirable ones?
Margot: When you're crossing these grapes, are you actually like pollinating them?
Bruce: Yeah, we bring pollen from selection A to the female variety selection B. We keep foreign pollen out of the process. We bag the clusters. We make sure the grapes, the flower clusters, don't self pollinate because the flowers are all producing not just berries, they're also producing pollen. We mark those clusters so we can come back and harvest them in the fall. And those are the clusters that we that result from our hybridizations in the field.
Margot: Very cool, thanks for explaining that. How do you work with your grower partners to test those in the field? Is there a process that they follow? Do you choose where they are?
Bruce: That's a really interesting question because the university likes to maintain control of the new varieties for the purpose of patenting so that we can derive some income to keep the programs going. We do have a process where grapes go out the door in two different ways before they're even named. One is through two of our nursery collaborator partner—Double A Vineyards in Western New York and Amberg Nursery in Clifton Springs, New York. They list in their online catalogs some of our Cornell selections that are being considered for possible release in five or ten years, and they will offer them not exactly for sale, because for sale implies commercialization, but you can test them for a per vine fee.
They handle the written agreements with Cornell. It's a simple one or two page agreement that just acknowledges that these varieties are experimental and still owned by Cornell, and then we seek out feedback from whomever plants these grapes, especially those that plant a hundred vines of each and have something more than one or two vines where they can give us a considerate opinion on how the grape does. In some cases, people have produced small quantities of commercial wines and they bring us that feedback, like in the case of our recently released Aravelle—it was sold for two or three years under the label Heart of the Finger Lakes by Weis Vineyards. They were getting it from a grower who was growing it as a numbered selection, NY81.
[Watch this video interview with Bruce to learn more about Aravelle.]
It was experimental still, but they were producing a generic wine with it. The feedback was coming to us that the wine is selling well, people like it, they come into the tasting room, the grower's doing well with it. It's a Riesling hybrid, but it grows better than Riesling, ripens a little earlier, doesn't have bunch rot like Riesling. So through that process, we're getting some good feedback. Eventually that NY81 was named Aravelle almost a year ago in March.
There's one other process, and that is a coordinated variety trial with university partners. It's coordinated through the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and it's not funded except state by state, but it includes protocols for uniform testing, whether the faculty or the extension personnel in charge of testing are in Indiana or Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin Minnesota, or Cornell. Vermont has quite a testing program. Massachusetts is part of this as well. So these numbered selections we try first to get them to our colleagues at the universities so they can put these selections in trials versus other selections developed by other private or public breeders.
When we named and released Aravelle, our colleague in Ohio, Dr. Dami provided some really good data from his trials that helped us support the justification for release.
Margot: Oh, interesting. You're able to get not only feedback from all across the states, ideally, but feedback from commercial growers that are local as well. Okay. And are you able to understand from those growers, which growers were growing organically, which had what kinds of spray programs, so you can see how the plant responds to different ways of growing?
Bruce: I would get varying levels of detail. I didn't always get complete information. What was key to me was something about the location and the comments. They often weren't measuring disease or yield in their vineyard, and some provided that information for the Aravelle release, but but others were giving me general comments, like does very well at this site or just medium growth compared to X, Y, or Z. Sometimes they only had time to send me their general impressions, but it was still better information than I had. I didn't necessarily know how it was performing in the various locations where growers might report back.
Margot: Okay. That's interesting. When growers are looking to select grapes from their new vineyards, how do we make the right choice for which grapes to grow on our soils or in our climates?
Bruce: Well if you're growing in an area where you're the only grower in town, it's kind of up to you. Connect with anyone in Extension who can give you some advice. Connect with anyone who knows about growing grapes in Maine [or wherever you’re located]. I would generally find that growers are willing to share their information. If you're the only person around in Maine or wherever you might be, you might have to put in some small trials yourself, maybe your best guess is Marquette, and you want to scale up fast, perhaps you scale up your Marquette, put in five or ten vines each of some others and see how they do.
How do they stack up? What about Clarion? What about Itasca? L’Acadie Blanc from Nova Scotia? You may have a longer growing season being so close to the ocean, but you also have a fairly cool growing season. Yet things are changing, you have to have some knowledge of your climate and how certain varieties perform. Put them on a representative part of your site. You may not want to put them on the best or the worst part of your site, but if your site is variable, choose a middle of the road location and let's see how five or ten of each perform. In a few years you can start making some decisions yourself after seeing them through several winters, several summers.
In the grape breeding process, it doesn't take me long to produce new varieties. I can get a seedling to fruit in three years. I can make the cross in three years. From now I can start seeing fruit, but I can't release a grape in three years because I need to know how is that grape going to perform for five years or 10 years? How is it going to perform at one site? No. How is it going to perform at five sites? Growers are not going to want a grape if you only have one year of harvest information at one location. You're making a big investment for the next 20, 30 years every time you plant a grape. You can't dig them up and replant every five years, so it's a big decision.
Just like as a breeder, I need to test for a number of years at a number of locations. At least you have one location, you can start to see after three or four years of fruiting, what's really going to be promising for you.
Margot: I read that it took you that 40 years to release Aravelle. What have you learned about the grape in that process as you were collecting data?
Bruce: Well first of all, it doesn't usually take 40 years. Sometimes the idea of releasing the grape comes back to you rather than you pushing the grape. The growers started pushing me to release it because they learned some things that I didn't. At about the 20/25 year point, where normally I might release a grape after 20 or 25 years after the cross was made, at that point the growers were coming back to me and saying, you know, you're starting to ignore this grape but we're seeing the potential for it. I did some additional testing, especially some fermentation testing and learned a lot more about best practices for fermentation, and did some research to verify grower observations about bunch rot resistance. Then the pandemic delayed the tasting of some of the the wines fermented with seven different yeast strains, so it doesn't always take that long.
What we learned is that there were a couple of strains of yeast that enhanced the fruity aromatic content. The others were okay. There was no differentiation between the other strains, but there were two strains that that came to the top of the list. When we wrote the release bulletin up, we were able to share that knowledge with everyone. Then we were able to justify the release based on the increase in rot resistance and the fact that compared to its parent Riesling, you don't have to worry when you begin to see a little bit of bunch rot on Aravelle.
First of all, it doesn't get sour rot, which is a bigger concern, but when it does get some botrytis bunch rot it doesn't spread very much or very fast. So you can let it ripen another week if that's your plan, if you'd like a really well ripened Aravelle to harvest. You can let it ripen another week and not worry too much about botrytis overtaking it where it's not wanted. On the other hand, with Riesling, when the rot begins, you have to pick it. It can go so fast. It's very tight clustered and the rot can spread very quickly and could include some sour rot too. So it makes a wine that's very similar to Riesling, but it's earlier ripening and you can let it ripen more fully without the concern like you would have with Riesling.
That is comparing Aravelle grown without any sprays to control bunch rot versus Riesling grown with sprays to control bunch rot. We also we also learned that it needs to be grafted. We were seeing that at the 20/25 year point that our vines on their own roots were getting smaller and smaller, but the grafted vines grew beautifully, and it's a higher yielding grape when grafted than our Riesling is.
Margot: Very interesting. That’s awesome, I’m excited to try some Aravelle wines soon! I'm curious to ask you about patterns around climate change that you've seen for growers in New England. Here in Maine, we're really noticing differences in high temperature fluctuations, and a lot more water and erosion. It's hard to tell whether that's a short term climate thing or a long term climate thing. I'm wondering what the patterns you've seen and how you've helped growers deal with some of those issues.
Bruce: We're also seeing different temperature patterns. We're sometimes seeing the polar vortex coming down here, and we're not as ready for the polar vortex because it's often preceded by fairly mild winter temperatures. So the grapes don't seem as well acclimated before the below zero temperatures hit the area.
In terms of the whole growing cycle, I'd say the the length of the growing season has generally gotten a little longer from frost to frost. However, the frequency of post bud break frost has increased, and that was a major concern in 2023. We had shoots out 6 to 12 inches, and then we had temperatures below 25 Fahrenheit through much of the Finger Lakes, and a little colder in the southern part of the Finger Lakes, a little warmer where I am.
I experienced between 10 to 40 percent kill of actively growing shoots. These are green growing shoots. I've never seen a frost that late here. This has happened, I know, to my colleagues in the Midwest, but to see that here, that's very unusual. So we're starting to see these very late spring frosts which was more typical of the Midwestern climates. We're seeing more rain and drought events. And that's hard, right? When, when you think about approaching anything from a breeding perspective, how do you breed both for drought resistance and flooding tolerance? Luckily, I haven't seen flooding or heavy rainfall to the extent that you really have to worry about the root system.
Usually in a few days it drains off and the roots are still okay. You generally don't plant on heavy, wet, clay soils anyway. Grapes like to be well drained. Now the drought conditions most growers do not irrigate, right? Probably the same in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York. We don't irrigate. There are a few that have the ability to irrigate, and that could help them through the droughty periods. But the expense of setting up an irrigation system could be very costly. It has been shown to be effectively beneficial to vineyard establishment, getting vines up and growing and filling the trellis faster when you start out with these tiny root systems.
Another thing I'd say about climate the flowering time is moving earlier and earlier. My technician and I, we’re both dads, and for 25 years we’d both be in the vineyards on Father's Day. Every year. It was just remarkable how the peak of flowering was so consistently just after Father's Day, but around Father's Day. However most of the last seven, eight years, it's about a week earlier. I've had Father's Day to my family. We track Concord flowering and there's a lot of data at Cornell on time of first flower for Concord in Western New York, and it's generally trending earlier and earlier.
Then what happens with harvest? The growing season is a great equalizer, and that's still variable. This year, I did see a lot of things ripening much earlier than expected. We're ready to bring grapes in by the end of August and we're waiting for our colleagues in food science to be ready. If we go back to drought and flooding, the other thing that comes with that is diseases and insects. Our approach is to develop disease resistant grapes. It becomes even more important when you are growing grapes for a humid climate, where some diseases are doing better when it's dry. Powdery mildew can propagate even when the weather is dry, powdery mildew is a big problem, even in California, under dry land farming conditions.
Powdery and downy are very important, and black rot is very important in the eastern U. S., but I'm also seeing some diseases that I thought were more important to the south starting to march northward. I've seen some anthracnose, for instance. My colleagues in Japan and some from Florida have worked on anthracnose resistance. The new breeder might want to keep an eye on this and try to incorporate anthracnose resistance into the program. As you start backing off on the spray programs for powdery and downy, other diseases start to show up, and plus the climate change is more permissive to other diseases.
Margot: Anthracnose is a big problem in our vineyards, with our Marquette. I’d love to see a more resistant variety. I'm curious to ask you which grapes you're excited about today that you think have, major potential into the future.
Bruce: I'll go to one of my go to's—Traminette was a grape that we developed and released in 1996. It's done so well. What I like about it these days, is that it has late bud break. It could potentially help you avoid some climate change issues with spring frost. No amount of grape breeding will solve all the climate change issues. I think you have to look at elements of canopy management, of sprays that are being developed by physiologists to delay bud break. You might have to look at rhizobium soil inoculants to help vines become more resilient under challenging conditions. There's work in all these areas. But variety wise, Traminette is a great choice.
Aravelle has sort of middle of the road bud break, much more winter hardy in midwinter, and a much higher yielding grape. The acidity at harvest is higher. So if your climate is trending warmer during the harvest period, you won't lose the acidity on Aravelle because the acidity starts out higher. I like the idea of diversifying, which it sounds like you're doing in your vineyard, you're not going with all Marquette or all Petite Pearl. You're looking at some of the riparia types and some of the other hybrid vinifera derived types like Cayuga. Going with a monoculture like we have around the world, about 80 percent of viticulture around the world consists of 12 varieties like Cabernet and Chardonnay and Airén from Spain grown on huge acreages around the world, but diversity is going to be really important.
Margot: That makes sense. You’ve been doing this a long time—what brings you joy in the work that you've been doing?
Bruce: Seeing people use it. I had an email from a grower in Pennsylvania who heard I was retiring. I didn't know him at all. But he said, I'm from such and such a winery, not too far from Allentown and Wilmington, and I want you to know how aonderful your varieties are. We're using them for this and that type of wine, and hearing that just brings me immense joy. I appreciate also when my colleagues talk about some of the scientific advances to be able to genetically pre select from seedlings, which ones have disease resistance genes.
There's nothing like hearing from someone in the industry where my varieties are having an impact, and that they appreciated it, that they know it came from Cornell. They know I had a role in it and they're coming back to me. I have a gift from a winery in Missouri of a case of wine that included the number of wines made from my varieties. This is just so cool to visit these wineries. I once heard at a wine show, a big wine show held at the Watkins Glen Racetrack, someone behind me asking one of the wineries that had a booth there, can I try your Traminette? I'll always remember that because they had no idea that they were calling that out over the person that developed Traminette. That was just so cool.
When I go visit some of the winemakers and growers who were very high on hybrid varieties and hybrid varieties are helping them make a living and helping them bring people into the winery and doing so well for them. They're so thankful. Well, I just appreciate what they're doing. They're doing the hard work of growing it and turning it into wines that people want. I developed it, put it out there and that's really satisfying.
Margot: That's amazing. That's great to hear. Thank you so much for your time. I’m excited to try some Aravelle wines and maybe get my hands on some plant material!
Learn more about Aravelle from this Wine Enthusiast piece and this interview with Bruce Reisch. Want to be able to ask questions of upcoming interviewees? Become a paid subscriber for just $5/month, and help me focus on bringing you more interviews with folks in the wine industry.