This is a list of every cold hardy grape available, and all are known to do well in zone 4. We’re incredibly lucky to have very well-stocked local nurseries that cater to a fruit-loving permaculture audience, so I never knew they were hard to find! I know that’s not the case everywhere, but most of these grape varieties are available by mail order as well. We grow around a dozen varieties, but there are nearly 40 grapes that are hardy to zone 4 or colder. When I learned that northern gardeners have trouble sourcing cold hardy grapes that will grow in zone 4, I decided to do this rundown of grape varieties…and I learned there are even more options on there to try. They’ve always been a part of our homestead, and at this point, we harvest probably 30 to 50 gallons of fresh grapes every single year…and the harvest is the only care they see all year. They’re full-sized productive vines in just 2-3 years. We’d propagate the grape varieties we really liked, and growing grapes from cuttings is incredibly easy. Looking online, we found Fedco Trees, which sells quite a few cold-hardy grape varieties too. Our local nursery sold half a dozen varieties, and then when a new nursery opened up that sold 3 or 4 more, we added those too. We then promptly forgot about them, and they’ve grown wild without a care ever since. We loved fresh grapes, and already made fruit wines, mead (honey wine), and even homemade beer on a regular basis, so they seemed like a logical choice.Īnywhere we had a fenceline, we’d plop down a wheelbarrow full of compost and add in a grapevine. Grapes were one of the first things we planted here on our Vermont homestead (Zone 4a). There are even a few cold hardy seedless grape varieties too! They’re absolutely delicious right off the vine and will keep decently if refrigerated. There are, however, at least ten different zone 4 table grapes to consider as well. Most zone 4 grape varieties are wine grapes, which just means they’re intensely sweet (but also often soft-skinned and poor keepers). Believe it or not, there are nearly 40 different varieties of grapes that you can grow in zone 4! Many winemakers blend small volumes of teinturier juices into their wines, to boost the colour, without dramatically impacting the taste.Cold hardy grape varieties can be hard to find, but they do exist, and they’re a great way to add variety to your crops on a northern homestead. Teinturier varieties, while containing a lot of color, usually make special wines, perhaps due to a higher level of tannins, compounds structurally related to the anthocyanins. The name teinturier comes from French, meaning to dye or to stain. The red color of red wine comes from anthocyanins extracted from the macerated (crushed) skins, over a period of days during the fermentation process. In most cases, anthocyanin pigments are confined to the outer skin tissue only, and the squeezed grape juice of most dark-skinned grape varieties is clear. Teinturier grapes are grapes whose flesh and juice is red in colour due to anthocyanin pigments accumulating within the pulp of the grape berry itself. The vast majority of red wine grapes, like the Grenache, express white juice, with the red color of red wines coming from the grape's skin as part of the winemaking process. A demonstration of the difference between a red fleshed teinturier grape ( Agria shown on the left) and a red wine grape variety ( Grenache on the right) with its skin removed to show that both flesh and juice are naturally white.
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