With a history that dates back more than 150 years, grapes have been a longstanding tradition in Chautauqua County.
The Concord Grape Belt is approximately 60 miles long, stretching along the Lake Erie coastline from the Town of Hanover all the way to the Town of Ripley and into Erie County, Pa. Andrew Dufresne, executive director of the Concord Heritage Grape Belt Association, said that the economic impact the growth of grapes has on the region is major.
Major processors that are based in the area - including Welch's, Cliffstar, Growers' Cooperative and Mogen David - are responsible for shipping locally grown grape products around the country and world, Dufresne said.
''We have several very large food processors that are doing a lot of exporting of our grape product,'' he said. ''It has a great impact.''
And while Dufresne said the juice industry is what truly drives the grape business in Chautauqua County, the wine industry has been growing rapidly and has become an important aspect of the field. There are currently 21 wineries along the Chautauqua-Lake Erie Wine Trail, and Dufresne said another is scheduled to open in July. An easy trail to travel - mostly along routes 5 and 20 - and a short drive from several regional cities, the trail is bringing a lot of tourism recognition and dollars to the region, Dufresne said.
''(Visitors) come up and visit the wineries, dine in the restaurants, spend the night in the hotels or the bed and breakfasts,'' he said.
Dufresne said that the local wine trail has been receiving a lot of attention on the national media scene, including recent stories in the Chicago Tribune and the American Automobile Association magazine. Combine that relatively new tourist attraction with the already existing features of Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua Lake and others, he said, and something special is growing.
''It's been giving us some good, free publicity,'' Dufresne said. ''With the collaboration with the other tourism venues, it fits in nicely and gives people a reason to come here.''
CHANGES OVER THE YEARS
Grapes were first planted in Chautauqua County in the mid-1800s, Dufresne said. Planted for wine consumption, many of the grapes were European varieties - and the harsh local winters devastated the crops.
Concord grapes - native to America - were introduced to the region shortly thereafter, and the hardiness of the variety allowed it to survive what Mother Nature offered it. It soon became the dominant variety of the region, which is now the largest Concord grape-growing region in the world.
The market in the early years was for table grapes, Dufresne said, with as many as 4,000 traincar-loads of baskets of grapes being shipped out of the county each year in the early 1900s. But while the region had become a hotbed for the table grape industry, another industry was about to spring forth and change the business once again.
''About that time, Dr. Thomas Welch developed the process of pasteurization of grape juice to make an unfermented juice rather than wine,'' Dufresne said. ''By the early 1900s, we had pretty much switched to a Concord variety of grapes - probably 80-90 percent of the grapes, which is still the case today - and the principal use became juice, used for making jams and jellies, and juice consumption. The industry has continued that way.''
While wineries continued to exist during the early part of the century, the onset of Prohibition in the 1920s put them out of business. The market became focused even more intently on table and juice consumption, Dufresne said, and continue to grow that way even after Prohibition was repealed.
It wasn't until the Pennsylvania Limited Winery Act of 1968 and the New York Farm Winery Act of 1976 allowed individual grape farms to establish small wineries that the wine industry began to grow in the region again. Today, the Chautauqua-Lake Erie Wine Trail, extending from Silver Creek to North East, boasts 21 wineries that produce unique and diverse vintages that are enjoyed by consumers across the state, nation and world.
MECHANICAL REVOLUTION
Though changes have happened in the type of grape grown in vineyards and in the predominant product made in the region, perhaps the biggest change over the years in the grape industry has been the method by which the crop has been cultivated, Dufresne said.
And while grapes have been grown in the region for more than 150 years, it has only been in recent decades that the labor management process has began to see a major change, he said.
''In the early development of the grapes, of course everything was done by hand - the picking of the grapes, the work maintaining the vineyard, the harvesting,'' Dufresne said. ''In the 1970s, we introduced mechanization of operation.''
With labor becoming more of a challenge to find, Dufresne said, the industry may have altogether faded away had mechanical harvesting methods not been developed. Today, he said, nearly all grapes are harvested using large machinery, and other labor-intensive aspects of the growing process are also mechanically aided.
''What we've seen occurring in recent years is an increase in the mechanization of the trimming operation - all of the grapes have to be trimmed back every year to control the size of the crop,'' Dufresne said. ''And we see mechanically assisted pruning, which again is having quite an impact on the grape industry.''
Dufresne said that while he would estimate that about 98 percent of grapes in the region are harvested mechanically, grape farmers are in three camps when it comes to mechanical trimming.
''Some grape growers 100 percent trim by hand - you have a skilled trimmer, you're going to get better results, but it's going to cost more per acre,'' Dufresne said. ''Some people use a combination of a trimmer, like a hedger, to trim back some of the long vine growth, and then a hand trimmer comes through to finish up the job with less hours of labor. Third, some vineyard operators have gone completely to mechanical pruning with no, or very little, follow-up handwork.''
Using mechanical trimming and pruning techniques allows grape farmers to better control cost and labor, Dufresne said, and also gives them the opportunity - should they choose it - to shoot for a larger crop.
''Growers are basically starting out aiming for a larger crop, and then if you get frost damage, you're OK,'' Dufresne said. ''If you don't get frost damage, you can come back and do a little more mechanical work in the middle of the season so you don't have too big of a crop that won't get ripe. But some farmers are being able to increase yield by having a little more flexibility.''
More flexibility means more grapes. And more grapes means more success for one of the most important agriculture industries in Chautauqua County, Dufresne said.
''We did a study with Cornell University and Penn State University a couple years ago, and the economic impact in Chautauqua County and Erie County (Pa.) was $340 million a year, so it's a major economic engine,'' Dufresne said. ''A lot of that is because of the great value that is added through the processing and marketing of grapes in the area.''
