Sean O’Keefe has followed the weather patterns on the Old Mission Peninsula for decades. His father moved the family there to start Chateau Grand Traverse, the area’s first commercial winery, in 1974; the trailblazing Ed O’Keefe planted cool-climate Riesling as well as Chardonnay and Merlot. Now the winemaker for Mari Vineyards on that same peninsula, Sean O’Keefe says the region has warmed noticeably over the years and he now can cultivate grape varieties that weren’t on winegrowers’ radars in the ’70s and ’80s.
“We have warmed up to the point where reds are viable, especially if we make it in a style that fits what’s going on here,” O’Keefe says. Mari, he adds, is a “majority red winery, which is an anomaly” in the area. “I plant a lot of Italian varieties that come from Alpine areas of northern Italy, so they can still withstand our winters and those [cold snap] events, but they’re also able to ripen within the windows that are now our longer growing season.”
Those northern Italian grapes include the dark, richly colored Refosco and the fruity-yet-mellow Teroldego, which are combined with more well-known grapes such as Merlot and Pinot Noir in Mari’s popular red blends.
Indeed, the lengthening of the growing season has improved the quality of Michigan’s red wine grapes and opened the door to new varieties, says Esmaeil Nasrollahiazar, a viticulture extension educator at Michigan State University Extension. But he cautions that the changing climate also brings new challenges with it.
Just last year, “it was a great vintage, a very dry harvest season, and lots of sun,” Nasrollahiazar says. “Many growers were happy, but some of them had issues with irrigation.” In August and September, he explains, some growers had only 2 millimeters of rainfall, “and two months is long enough to introduce stress to a plant.”
“We have to keep an eye on the soil moisture,” he says.
Another potential stressor is the increased frequency of polar vortex weather patterns, which bring a sudden surge of extra- frigid air. What was formerly a once-in-a-decade event now occurs more often, Nasrollahiazar says. Such a weather event can have disastrous consequences for winegrowers.
“In the beginning of 2024, we had the polar vortex in Southwest Michigan, and we lost 70% of vinifera over there,” Nasrollahiazar says. “If you lose that much grape, then automatically the price of the grape is going to increase. Of course, depending on the demand, the price of the wine also may increase.”
A difficult aspect of these weather patterns is their increasingly unpredictable nature. Nasrollahiazar says vineyard operators have no way to know what kind of season they should expect: Will a polar vortex kill half of their crop, or will a mild winter give way to a long growing and harvest season, leading to their best vintage ever?
All the while, the silent guardian protecting Michigan through every kind of weather is its abundant surrounding water. “The Great Lakes are the best thing we have going for the future because any changes that happen, be it warm or cold, the lakes mitigate that,” O’Keefe says. “They act as a buffer.”
He hasn’t forgotten the winter of 2015, which brought extreme cold that froze even the Great Lakes, meaning winegrowers “lost all … protection.”
“Those [cold weather] events can still happen,” O’Keefe says.
But in the context of global climate disasters, Michigan fares better than many regions. “In this modern era now — with the nonstop fires on the West Coast, the incredible hail and flooding you see in Europe, the droughts and fires in Australia — what we call terroir is now a disaster,” O’Keefe says.
“The rest of the world,” he notes, “is trying to figure out how to deal with all these big changes. In Michigan, especially northern Michigan, we’re already very well versed in this. … We can ski on ice; we can ski on powder, too.”
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