"A Gut Punch": Spring Freeze Devastates Vineyards in the Mid-Atlantic
How Wine Lovers Can Help Growers Survive the Loss
For the past few years, I — and others — have written about wine as a community rather than industry. It’s a way to emphasize wine’s power to connect us to the Earth and to each other. Wine as community recognizes wine as more than a mere product and consumers as full members, not just sales statistics. Well, now it’s time for us here in the Eastern United States at least to stand up and support the most important members of our wine community: the farmers.
We over-romanticize wine. The idyllic lifestyle, walking among the beautifully manicured vineyards, dining al fresco while turning our large fortunes into smaller ones to live the good life, communing with the land to express its voice in our glass as an expression of fine art. It all sounds as glossy as the magazines that chronicle this utopia.
But dammit, wine is farming, and farming is hard. And Mother Nature is a capricious taskmaster as winegrowers in the Eastern United States learned in late April, ironically just a day before Earth Day.
An stretch of summer-like temperatures in the 90s had encouraged vines to push their buds and tendrils into action. But on the morning of April 21 temperatures plunged well below freezing throughout much of Virginia, Maryland, southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and into southern New York. It soon became apparent that the damage to the 2026 vintage in some areas bordered on catastrophic.
Growers have reacted to the frost with frustration, resignation and despair, along with a call to consumers to support local wineries in a time of need. If wine is indeed community rather than an industry, it’s time for us to step up. Visit an extra winery or two. Buy an extra bottle or two. As one winery said on social media, “Hug a farmer.”
Locavore restaurants who celebrate their local farmers can help by featuring local wines on their tasting menus or special sections on their lists for higher visibility. Schedule an extra winemaker dinner or two this summer. Help your neighbors get through this.
Spring frost is not unusual in the Mid-Atlantic. Home gardeners know not to put fragile plants in the ground before Mother’s Day. Winegrowers are accustomed to spending spring nights in their vineyards when temperatures dip, ready to light fires, run fans or frost dragons — noisy contraptions that shoot flames briefly along the vine rows to warm the air — to mitigate any damage. The wealthiest may even hire helicopters to buzz the vineyards and keep the air moving. But that Tuesday morning the temperatures dropped too low and for too long and with no wind for any of these measures to help.
“A frost is not a frost is not a frost,” said Nate Walsh, co-owner and winemaker at Walsh Family Wine in Loudoun County, Virginia. “The temperature at 500 feet is not the same as the temperature at 700 feet. The April 21st frost was a radiation frost, where clear skies and calm winds allow heat to escape the earth’s surface and rise into the atmosphere, creating an inversion where cold air from above settles.”
The damage was “nauseating,” Walsh said. “Frost doesn’t frustrate winegrowers. It doesn’t sadden us. Frost fills us with dread.”
If wine is indeed community rather than an industry, it’s time for us to step up. Visit an extra winery or two, buy an extra bottle or two.
A full accounting of the loss will take weeks, until the vines recover and push any secondary shoots for a more limited crop. But initial assessments were dire.
Lee Hartman, winemaker at Bluestone Vineyard in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, described the disaster as a “slow moving train wreck,” beginning with the 10-day forecast warning of plunging temperatures even while the valley basked in early spring warmth. He and his crew made their usual preparations and lit fires to warm the air, but “this wasn’t just a frost. It was a hard freeze.” Even before he doused water on the fires, Hartman was trading messages with fellow winemakers telling of the extent of the damage.
The night was “unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Emma Pope, communications manager at Black Ankle Vineyards in Mt. Airy, Maryland, posted on the winery’s Facebook page. “We’re choosing to be optimistic before we make a final assessment, though we are dealing with the possibility that this year’s fruit is largely if not entirely lost.”
Not far away, the Baker family reported similarly catastrophic damage at their two vineyard sites, Old Westminster Winery and Burnt Hill Farm. “The primary buds appear to be 100 percent gone,” Drew Baker, who manages the vineyards for the family operation, wrote on Burnt Hill’s website. “Across both farms, we believe we may have lost upwards of 100 tons of fruit.”
That could mean roughly 72,000 bottles of wine that will not be produced at Old Westminster and Burnt Hill this year, Baker said. And while that revenue will be lost, expenses, from payroll, equipment repairs, farming inputs and more, remain. The vineyards must be maintained as if they were bearing a full crop in order to keep them in optimal shape for next year.
In Virginia, Jim Law of Linden Vineyards reported his first significant loss since planting his Hardscrabble Vineyard in 1985. Because of the elevation and slope of the vineyard, he estimated the damage at 20-30 percent. Even so, he said, “It is difficult to convey the gut punch of walking the vines after a devastating event like frost or hail. You feel physically sick and emotionally devastated.”
Spring frost damage to vineyards has become a familiar global refrain during the era of climate change, as warmer weather in late winter and early spring nudges vines out of dormancy and promotes early growth. Even “normal” frosts are more damaging than they were when vines slumbered longer into spring. Burgundy suffered major crop damage in 2016, 2017 and 2021. This year, Texas experienced early vine growth followed by a damaging frost, and Champagne recorded its worst frost year since 2003, with an estimated 40 percent crop loss.
With the extent of the damage in the eastern U.S., growers are pleading with consumers to support their local wineries by visiting and buying current releases. In the Mid-Atlantic, those will include many high-quality reds from the outstanding 2023 vintage. We can help the wine community by celebrating that vintage while helping growers survive this one.
I thought about the frost this week as I walked my dogs along the trail in the woods near my house in the Maryland suburbs just north of Washington, D.C. This suburban oasis of nature was not unscathed; lesser celandine, a non-native invasive but very attractive ground cover plant, was scorched in places, as if someone had randomly sprayed herbicide. Some shoots of mountain laurel, our area’s glory in May, withered and browned.
Yet the mountain laurel will still bloom and the woods will be as glorious as ever this summer. The native American grape vines I find throughout these woods will thrive and sprout, continuing their climb through the tree canopy in search of sunlight. If they produce any grapes, they will be well above my sight line, treats for the birds in hopes they spread seeds to help new vines grow.
But vineyards are not natural. They’re imposed by mankind upon the environment, like any other farm or orchard, and therefore more susceptible to the vagaries of nature and climate. The ramifications can be profound.
Think of it this way: If you or I have a bad day at work, most of us can take a hot shower and make it good tomorrow. Winegrowers suffering a frost like that of April 21 in the Mid-Atlantic have just lost most if not all of their product for 2026, with implications for years to come. It’s as though Mother Nature gave them a withering performance assessment after the first quarter instead of waiting until the end of the year.
At Allegro Winery near York, Pennsylvania, owner/winemaker Carl Helrich is planting vines this spring to replace some of the thousands he lost to a hard freeze in 2018. Now, with much of his vineyard once again frosted, “it feels like planting flowers in a graveyard,” he said.
“I spent the last two or three days doing a lot of soul searching about what we are doing here, and so many times on the verge of tears because we care so much about these vines, and I know it’s been really hard on my crew to come out here after spending so many days since November, pruning these vines and getting them ready for the growing season,” Helrich said in a video post on Facebook.
He compared growing grapes in Pennsylvania to the Greek myth of Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill only to start over after the stone rolls back down.
“We think we have everything figured out,” he said. “And then Mother Nature decides to kick us in the ass.”
Please leave a comment here to share your experience with the frost or to show support for your favorite winemakers. And please share this post with your friends to increase awareness about the plight of Mid-Atlantic wineries.
Thank you Dave for posting this and your support of our industry. Resilience is the word of the, forget the day, season!
Thank you for sharing this. Thinking of these wineries! Makes me all the more grateful for the wine I drink, (and the labor of love or even heartache that could have gone into making it).