Greg Krieger Grower Interview

yler Bertsch: All right, so I got a generic list of questions that I want to go through, then we can rabbit trail, but how did you first get into doing this?

Greg Krieger: I've been interested in growing grapes since I was a little kid. My mom was pretty accommodating, and she let me order some plants from Gurneys back when I was in grade school. I think with that one plant, I just did it wrong. I violated so many things that I would have known better to do now. I think it was a Concord. It already had a grape cluster forming on it the very first year it was planted.

I grew up in the northwest part of the state, and there are a lot of challenges there with water quality, soil, and the climate. When I got out of college and was looking for a job, I landed one in the eastern part of the state. After college, I lived in the tropics in the Peace Corps for a couple of years, and then I went to work in the eastern part of the state. I still haven't decided where the bigger, more drastic change in agriculture was: was it going from Western North Dakota to the tropics, or from Western North Dakota to eastern North Dakota? I still can't answer that.

Tyler Bertsch: Yeah.

Greg Krieger: I'm trying to recollect.

Tyler Bertsch: So where are you at now? Where's your vineyard located?

Greg Krieger: It's in Galesburg, North Dakota. It's a really cool spot geologically. This is not flat, boring, flyover country. This is a really cool area. I'm only a couple of miles from a spit from back when there was a glacial lake here on the eastern part of the state. Where water ran into the lake, the waves formed these hammerhead or golf club-shaped landforms right where the water meets a lake. There are many of those around the world, like in the south end of New Zealand, where spits form in the water. There was one right by me, and nobody knows about it. The farmer who used to farm one quarter of this spit was a cool guy; he looked a lot like Louis L'Amour. His name for it was Poverty Hill, which was an indication of what the productivity was like. I think it's fascinating. There are so many other things like that up in this flat, flyover country. Back when it was a glacial lake, and the dam let go, it probably changed the rotation of the earth by one one-thousandth of a second back 20,000 years ago. I can't prove that, but there are a lot of cool features here.

Tyler Bertsch: Yeah. What year did you first plant?

Greg Krieger: Where am I currently?

Tyler Bertsch: Yeah, where you’re currently.

Greg Krieger: We bought a house in ’92. We got married in ’89 and bought a house in ’92. It was wintertime, but I started planting stuff right away. I think grapes were quick on the list. I got some pear trees, apricots, and there were two apple trees here, of which one is still living.

I was working in agriculture, and the agricultural economy was not that promising back then. That’s why people were hiring me to try to help them farm more efficiently or economically. I’d gotten a few questions: "What else could we be planting besides wheat, barley, soybeans, sunflowers, corn?" A really generous man said, "You can use part of my land next year." So I dug some grapevines that I stuck in back in ’92. They seemed to be going okay, so I decided to explore this a little bit more. My vineyard is not on my own land; it’s just by the generosity of a neighbor that I got the vineyard on his land.

Tyler Bertsch: But your first vine was in 1992?

Greg Krieger: In my yard, yeah. I made a mistake and found out how important sunshine is for certain varieties. I had it too close to a tree row because I thought "shelter." Some of these things you hear regarding fertility, microclimate, or protection are not true. You want full sun. Certain fertility recommendations in the books are probably totally wrong.

Tyler Bertsch: What was the first type of vine you planted? Was it a Concord, or what was it?

Greg Krieger: A Beta.

Tyler Bertsch: Oh, yeah.

Greg Krieger: That’s about all that was available back then that was hardy for that area. I’d heard about Betas when I was in grade school from a friend of my folks. I remember she just kept calling me Craig, and I was just an obedient young child, so I didn't correct her. She talked about all the grapes she was getting, so I thought, "I guess grapes do grow in North Dakota."

I first got three vines. I think they were two Betas and one K-Gray, which was supposed to be good for this area. Over the years, I added more: Swenson Red and Edelweiss. When I decided to plant on a bigger scale on my neighbor's land, I looked at the soil. It’s an unproductive piece of land. We live on what was Lake Agassiz, a glacial lake that covered Eastern North Dakota and Western Minnesota. It rivaled any of the Great Lakes back in its day. It was formed by the Laurentide ice sheet, which blocked the outflow to the Hudson Bay. A lot of this area was underwater, a couple of hundred feet deep, and it formed beaches and lacustrine soils. Eastern North Dakota is very rich soil.

Tyler Bertsch: What kind of soil does your vineyard have?

Greg Krieger: I started paying attention to soil types because I worked in agronomy. The soil type on most of it is an ABB. It’s a Hubbard soil. That Poverty Ridge I was telling you about is gravelly. If you get out below the beach, that’s where the Fargo clay comes in. It’s a much finer sediment that took longer to fall out of suspension when the glacial rivers gushed into the lake. Around here, it’s a lot of sand.

Tyler Bertsch: So, you got sandy soil, or is it like sandy loam?

Greg Krieger: Sandy loam. To be specific, the soil type is Arbilla with a B slope (1 to 3%). A few years ago they renumbered or re-coded these soil types; now I think it’s like an A365 soil type. It’s pretty sandy, but in between the beaches, there’s more clay, more coarse-grained soil, and much higher pH. My ABB soil is acidic. Going to college, you hear that North Dakota has basic soils. We don’t; not on ABB soils.

Tyler Bertsch: Did any of the grapes struggle with that soil?

Greg Krieger: We had one on the east of the vineyard, I can’t remember the variety, but as time went on, I went to the Cold Climate Conference in Minnesota. It was an eye-opening, world-class training opportunity. I met really cool people there that I’m still friends with today. One of the lessons was doing petiole tests. I read a lot of different sources on grapes, but they weren’t for this region; they were for California or other states. Some had blanket recommendations to apply potassium or boron. But at the conference, they said to do petiole tests to find out what your grapes are actually missing. I’ve been a strong proponent of that.

When we got some state funding several years ago, I lobbied to sponsor North Dakotans to go to that conference in Minnesota rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. We got a really nice turnout of participants from North Dakota going to learn about growing grapes.

Tyler Bertsch: When you did that petiole testing, did the test come back showing you were deficient somewhere?

Greg Krieger: We were not deficient in boron or potassium. Things are different here than what the authors of those books concluded. We had to do our own research in our own areas.

Tyler Bertsch: When did you decide to plant a larger amount, like 100 or 300 vines?

Greg Krieger: I think it was 1997.

Tyler Bertsch: What were the first ones that you planted?

Greg Krieger: That was about the time the internet got invented. The big hype then was cold-climate wine grapes like Frontenac. I went to look for Frontenac and found nurseries online, but they were all sold out. I figured I would just get them a year later when some of the other vines died out. But the ones I planted didn't die out. Later, I went to the Cold Climate Conference and tasted Frontenac, and I thought, "Is this what all the fuss is about?" I just was not impressed with Frontenac wine. You don’t want to be too outspoken, saying the emperor has no clothes, but...

Tyler Bertsch: Yeah. But what did you plant since you couldn’t get Frontenac?

Greg Krieger: Since we’re on the fringes of where grapes will go, there was no sense in going too far in on marginal varieties. I started a spreadsheet, scrounging websites for different ones that were mentioned. I knew how much space I had and the spacing I wanted. I decided to plant five or ten vines of the marginal ones, and 15 or 25 of the ones that seemed more hardy.

I think I ended up with about 20 varieties. Marechel Foch seemed promising, so I ordered it from two different places and ended up with 50 of those. I got 10 Aurora, 10 Seyval, 10 Vignoles, 25 Lacrosse, and 25 St. Pepin.

Tyler Bertsch: Which of those ended up surviving?

Greg Krieger: The ones that looked most promising—I must have guessed right. Frontenac, Seyval, and St. Pepin did pretty well. The French hybrids like Aurora, Seyval, and Vignoles did not do well. Baco Noir did horribly. I had some fun seedless ones too.

Lacrosse, which I think is a sister to Louise, did well initially with good productivity. I liked the flavor then—it had a fruity, apple character—and I thought Lacrosse was better than St. Pepin. Now I’m thinking the opposite. I think St. Pepin has a very good structure and nice body. It’s a real decent vine. I also got some Valiants because they are hardy enough even for Winnipeg.

In the meantime, I learned how to propagate vines. For my first vines, I paid $15 apiece. Then I learned how easy they are to propagate and realized charging $15 for a grapevine should be illegal.

Tyler Bertsch: Of those, which ones are still alive today?

Greg Krieger: I still have some Foch. Most of my St. Pepins are still plugging along. I planted another row of Lacrosse, but I’ve kind of abandoned it now. St. Croix is a nice volume grape for wine, though maybe not the best quality in the world.

Tyler Bertsch: Was St. Croix part of that first group?

Greg Krieger: Yes, St. Croix was.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you rip any vines out?

Greg Krieger: I did about ten years ago. I’m slow to make decisions, but I like to think I make the right ones. If a vine does poorly, is it the vine’s fault or my fault?

Tyler Bertsch: Out of those varieties, which was the most cold-hardy with the least amount of winter damage?

Greg Krieger: They all get winter damage. I came up with a rating system: less than one foot of dieback is a 1; three feet of dieback is a 3; if it dies back to the ground, that's a 5. But they still come back from the ground, so they’re not dead. For a few years, I was evaluating them on dieback. Baco Noir was a 5 every year.

There is survival and then there is wine quality. The wine I made from Baco Noir once tasted like dirty socks. That’s not an easy one to promote. I eventually pulled out most of my Baco Noir, Aurora, Vignoles, and Seyval. I had a Vanessa that just died on its own.

Tyler Bertsch: What rankings would you give Frontenac or St. Pepin?

Greg Krieger: By the time I finally got Frontenacs, productivity varied by the individual plant. I kept track for a number of years of how much fruit they yielded. I learned that a five-gallon bucket weighs different amounts depending on the variety—some are 20 pounds, others 25. A five-gallon bucket per vine is a reasonable number. I remember one year I got two five-gallon buckets from one St. Pepin vine.

Tyler Bertsch: If you had to rate St. Pepin for cold hardiness, what would you give it?

Greg Krieger: Another way to look at it is whether I'd plant more of it. Because of the wine quality and productivity, I would like to have more St. Pepins.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you have pollination issues with it?

Greg Krieger: Not really. I have three seedlings in my vineyard that don't match the rows they're in. One is between plants 7 and 8 in row K, so I call it 7.5. It's a really nice vine; I made a small batch of wine from it two years ago. There's another one that is so tart it's like a King of the North for acidity; I think I can dig that one out.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you think your St. Pepin was more cold-hardy than your Frontenac?

Greg Krieger: My St. Pepins are older than my Frontenacs by a few years. Frontenac is probably more consistent and produces bigger yields, but I think the concept of "growing ugly" is good. For Swanson Red, which is vigorous, don’t prune them all—just leave those canes, because that might be your fruit next year. I do that with Swanson Red and sometimes with St. Pepin and the seedless ones.

Tyler Bertsch: Which of those original varieties was the most cold-hardy?

Greg Krieger: Of course, it’s always going to be the Valiant.

Tyler Bertsch: Besides that one.

Greg Krieger: St. Croix is what I call the volume grape. Quality-wise it's medium, but if you want volume, you better have St. Croix because it's more productive than a lot of grapes.

Tyler Bertsch: Are you able to grow Brianna up there?

Greg Krieger: I have a few. When I started losing vines, I’d plant one here or there, so my Briannas are scattered rather than in a full row.

Tyler Bertsch: Are any of these hard to ripen, or can you get all of them to ripen in a normal year?

Greg Krieger: How do you define ripening?

Tyler Bertsch: Where you could make drinkable wine—hitting a certain Brix?

Greg Krieger: I was reluctant to get a pH meter because they sounded like high-maintenance and expensive. I settled on a refractometer for multiple years. Then I realized pH is a good thing to know, so I finally bought a meter.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you feel like some years you have to harvest in a hurry before the frost comes?

Greg Krieger: Are you talking about 2017?

Tyler Bertsch: Was that a bad year?

Greg Krieger: Yes, it was. 2012 was a warm one. In 2017, the wines were so tart you didn't want a second glass.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you use your grapes mainly for your own personal wine?

Greg Krieger: I mainly provide them to a winery.

Tyler Bertsch: What about herbicide drift? Do you have problems with that?

Greg Krieger: Self-inflicted or from somebody else?

Tyler Bertsch: From somebody else. Glyphosate, 2,4-D, or dicamba?

Greg Krieger: Oh, dicamba, yeah. I’ve had all of the above. I have a really good neighbor who is careful about spraying by my stuff. A long time ago, I contacted the Ag Department because I realized this was a potential problem. The smartest thing to do is avoid drift by letting neighbors and custom applicators know there’s a vineyard here.

The North Dakota Ag Department has been helpful. They have a registry for honeybee hives so people don't spray insecticide nearby, and they made one for vineyards. In their training for custom applicators, they tell them about it. So the applicators in North Dakota know about our vineyards and are very sensitive.

Tyler Bertsch: But you still get hit sometimes?

Greg Krieger: The worst ones are usually people trying to be careful. I was in a vineyard in the southwest part of the state that had herbicide drift. What was surprising was that the outermost row had the worst injury, and it stepped down row by row. The grapevines themselves shielded the next rows. I wouldn't have anticipated that since the canopy isn't that dense. It makes me think a row of trees or switchgrass could take the bulk of it. I’m a huge fan of switchgrass as a snow fence and dirt collector. It also does a wonderful job reducing herbicide drift.

Tyler Bertsch: Does it help?

Greg Krieger: I’m a total believer. This year, I gained about ten inches of soil next to my switchgrass. That’s a win—getting more topsoil on this gravelly, coarse-textured soil.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you notice any difference in how varieties respond to drift?

Greg Krieger: I’ve investigated lots of drift situations over the years. You can usually tell which direction it came from by seeing which side of the field has the worst injury. A few years ago, it seemed worse on the white varieties. I don't know if the color of the grape makes a difference, but that was my observation.

Tyler Bertsch: Could it be because they budded out faster and had more surface area?

Greg Krieger: Healthy vines are going to be healthy vines. If they’re limping along and then get herbicide drift on top of a frost or a lack of fertilizer, the stress is compounded. A lot of these things aren’t fatal on their own, but cumulative stress is the key.

Tyler Bertsch: Which varieties have problems with spring frost?

Greg Krieger: Maybe it’s my location, but I’m on a ridge. Our township is the highest elevation in the whole county because we’re on the coast from when the rest of the county was flooded in the Lake Agassiz days. We get a lot of air drainage. My vineyard is on a "hill"—maybe a 20-foot elevation difference. I grew up where there were real hills, so it’s been an adjustment when folks around here talk about hills. But air drainage of even ten feet is sufficient in this country. A lot of times I thought we should have had frost, but we escaped it.

Tyler Bertsch: Elevation definitely helps. In my vineyard, I can tell 20 feet makes a difference.

Greg Krieger: Oh, you can feel it. When you go down there 20 feet, do you have to use a hiking stick to go up something that steep?

Tyler Bertsch: No, it’s a gradual slope over a couple of acres, but you can definitely feel it in the morning.

Greg Krieger: Sometimes I've noticed low shoots getting hit, but the shoots up on the trellis were fine.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you train yours on high wire cordon?

Greg Krieger: I started out that way. Ignorance is bliss. I got a good chunk of my cuttings from Lon Rombough in Oregon. He unfortunately passed away about five years ago. Cuttings were only a buck apiece back then, and I grew up poor, so I did it on the cheap. I ordered from three different places: Lon Rombough, a place in Missouri, and a place in either New York or Vermont.

I put the vigorous ones on high wire. St. Pepin and Lacrosse were vigorous; they went from a 12-inch cutting to five feet in one season. I thought they were going to be monsters, so I put them on six-foot wires. For my St. Croix, I did a five-foot wire and another wire eight inches below it. When I started pruning, I realized the stuff on that lower wire was worthless because it got no sunshine. I might as well just put them on the top wire.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you ever have wind damage on your St. Croix? Are the shoots brittle?

Greg Krieger: I think it was common to many varieties. When you get new growth of two or three feet and then a nasty windstorm, I’d get breakage. I never paid close enough attention to see if it was one specific variety because they would just put up more buds and be fine. I had a day job to do; this was just my weekend project.

Tyler Bertsch: If you were going to start over, which two varieties would you pick based on wine quality and the ability to ripen?

Greg Krieger: For reds, I really like Marquette. For whites, St. Pepin is really nice. I used to prefer Lacrosse because of the fruity, apple character, but an older gentleman who picked grapes here told me his wife really liked the St. Pepin. Now I think more highly of it. I also didn't used to think highly of Valiant. People say any fruit character in wine is fine as long as it isn't "grape," and Valiant gives you grape. But my impression of Valiant wine has improved over the years.

Tyler Bertsch: If a grower asked you for a variety that won't have constant winter dieback in North Dakota, what would you tell them?

Greg Krieger: A guy from Jamestown called me recently asking to grow some grapes. I told him Marquette and St. Pepin are good ones to start with. St. Pepin has been pretty good for winter damage. If you want zero damage, put the whole vineyard into Valiant, but for quality, I like Marquette.

Tyler Bertsch: Have you planted Sabrevois?

Greg Krieger: Oh yeah. St. Croix is a bigger yielder, but if I were buying a case of wine, I’d get the Sabrevois.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you ever have Japanese beetles?

Greg Krieger: Not yet.

Tyler Bertsch: Which varieties have a difficult canopy to manage?

Greg Krieger: La Crescent has lots of growth. Frontenac is more manageable. I was at a vineyard by Jamestown where the leaves were the size of dinner plates. The wine wasn’t that good. They had black tilled soil and very vigorous vines; it was probably a jungle out there. Their soil was better than my gravel ridge, and because they tilled it, they had too much nitrification release from the organic matter.

Tyler Bertsch: Did you notice any trunk diseases like crown gall?

Greg Krieger: I’m not sure if I could identify crown gall, but I don't have many disease problems that way. Sometimes a trunk just dies without warning. One of my professors in college said fire blight in pear trees is related to fertility. If I see a problem, I might plant grass around the vine or not fertilize it.

When we got state funding for petiole tests, we collected samples from different vineyards. Some had black soil between rows and some had grass. If you have grass, you’re going to have a low nitrogen test. I saw one vineyard at a public institution where the grapes were several years old but hadn't reached the bottom wire yet. That was the record low nitrogen content.

Tyler Bertsch: What do you do for birds? Do you net?

Greg Krieger: If your objective is to grow wine grapes, net them. I used to have a Juneberry tree in my vineyard that I netted double, and birds would still get in. It’s like cocaine for a starling. But I go to a place four miles south that has Juneberries that are not netted, and they are wonderful. I don't know what’s going on there.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you have tricks for deer or raccoons?

Greg Krieger: We have a little dog who sleeps in the house, but I haven’t had a raccoon problem. I saw a hunting bird out today, though.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you use herbicide underneath the vine?

Greg Krieger: I’m not a chemophobe. I use Sulfometuron and Glyphosate. I also use Shuttle.

Tyler Bertsch: I've never heard of that. What do you use for fungicide?

Greg Krieger: Valiant is the canary in the coal mine. If you’re going to have fungal disease, look at the Valiants first. Some years we don’t get much disease, maybe one in five years.

Tyler Bertsch: Do you have trouble with black rot?

Greg Krieger: Foch and Valiant get it. Petite Pearl and Crimson Pearl have suffered some too. A lot of them get powdery mildew. Foch has been a bugger there. I don’t do much fungicide; on average, less than one spray a year.

Tyler Bertsch: It must be pretty dry up there. If I only did one spray, nine out of ten years my grapes would be gone from black rot. Do you notice downy mildew on La Crescent?

Greg Krieger: I get some downy mildew. It depends on the variety and the year. I bought a jug of Mancozeb a couple years ago. Back when I was working, I got some Headline to give to customers to play around with, and that has some curative and preventative properties.

Tyler Bertsch: What advice would you give to new growers after 30 years of doing this?

Greg Krieger: When I started agronomy work here, a guy told me regarding a new class of edible beans: "Don’t plant any more than you can afford to lose." That’s good advice. One farmer told me he wanted to plant a quarter-section of grapes—that’s more than there is in the whole state. You need a reality check.

My current crush is seedless varieties that are hardy. People want table grapes without seeds. You also need an outlet for your grapes. Are you going to make wine? Do you have a relationship with a winery? Can you make raisins or juice? I’d like to see Welch’s put out of business because we can grow better quality Valiant juice here than that colored water they sell. Have reasonable expectations. One friend lets people pick grapes at his vineyard and made a thousand dollars last year. I just have fun growing them. I want to make scones and raisins, so I’ve been propagating seedless vines.

Tyler Bertsch: I’m sharing information with growers in our region. I’ll be at the North Dakota Grape Growers Association and I'm taking research from different varieties to share. A lot of information out there is limited or inaccurate.

Tyler Bertsch: Nice talking to you.

Greg Krieger: Keep up the good work. Bye-bye.