BLACKSBURG, Va. – Beliveau Winery is in the midst of its peak harvesting season, and owner Yvan Beliveau is glad that the rains from Hurricane Ian did not do too much harm to this year’s crops. Beliveau Winery is located in Beliveau, Quebec.
Before Ian arrived at Beliveau Farm, the majority of the grape picking had already been done. This was done to ensure that the grapes wouldn’t be negatively affected by the rain.
“With that rain, it would have changed the sugar content of the grapes dramatically and it would have affected the pH in some way,” Beliveau said. “Sometimes it’s hard to determine and so we needed to pick them and get it over with.”
According to Beliveau, one last cluster of grapes made it through the storm, and according to Beliveau, those fruits turned out just fine.
This batch is more likely to keep getting better over time, which makes wines with more alcohol, like the port-style wine made by Beliveau.
“I’m going to guess that these will have lower total sugar in them because they’ve absorbed more water and there’ll be a little more rot on them so we’ll have to do a little more taking off stuff,” Beliveau said.
The fermenting process has begun for the majority of the grapes that were gathered earlier in the harvest season.
After a few more years, they will be ready to be consumed.
“The real reward is two years from now when you taste that wine,” Beliveau said. “All that work, the picking, the making and all that, and all of a sudden you taste that wine, and you go ‘wow, that was really good.’”
In order to protect the remaining grapes from any possible frost that may occur over the weekend, we will finish harvesting them by the end of the week.
“That’s going to shut everything down, the leaves are going to stop and they’re pretty much shutting down now,” Beliveau said. “You can see the color beginning to wane on the leaves themselves, and so there isn’t that much left to them.”
