Growing Grapes

This section guides you through the perils and pitfalls of grape growing, from pest control to site suitability to economic factors. Whether you’re a grape grower, winemaker or wine educator, you’ll find information you can apply toward your individual needs.

When deciding where to establish a vineyard, you will need to consider multiple factors for production, including climate, elevation and suitable grape varieties.

The maps below are provided to help in decision making and are not recommendations for or against any site or area. Because they are not all-inclusive in terms of conditions at the particular site, they should not replace an on-site evaluation which may reveal other potential positive or negative aspects. These maps were generated by John Boyer, a Virginia Tech geographer. For an explanation of factors to consider in site selection read Dr. Tony Wolf’s Virginia Tech publication Vineyard Site Selection.

Also see the following climate and weather resources for help planning your vineyard, maintenance programs and harvest:

• Weather Information for Horticulture from the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service. These leaflets cover frost protection, climate considerations, growing season, solar radiation and wind.
• Agricultural Weather Information Service Inc. (AWIS) charges a fee ($50 per month, 3-month minimum, $10 set-up fee) to log onto their site for information. For example, one of the reports they offer is a frost/freeze report that predicts 60 hours in advance. For each hour they predict dry bulb temperature, dew point, wet bulb temperature, wind speed, wind direction, cloud cover, inversion layer strength and dew and/or frost. This includes everything you would need to know for irrigation/wind machine start-up. The referenced page lets you look at samples of all of the various reports.