These vines should not have been alive. Only in their second leaf, they should have been vulnerable to the April 21 freeze that devastated vineyards and orchards throughout the Mid-Atlantic. Yet they looked healthy, extending straight up from their cardboard tubes, tendrils stretching in search of the mid-summer sun.
Parker Aellen found a Monarch vine with a small cluster of black grapes and offered berries to me and his cousin, Melissa Aellen.
“Still needs time, but pretty good,” Melissa said as we chewed the pulp and spat the seeds onto our hands. They were green and unripe. But yes, the juice was tart and tasty, just needing a little more sugar to balance the acid.
The Aellens won’t be making wine from these vines until next year, Mother Nature willing, but the vines’ survival offered some optimism in a depressing vintage. This 5-acre experimental plot, three miles west of their family’s main vineyard at Linganore Winecellars near Mt. Airy, Maryland, is planted with about 6,000 vines of fungus-resistant and cold-hardy grape varieties. Commonly called PiWis — a shortening of the consonant-heavy German term for fungus-resistant — they belong to a group of hybrid varieties developed over the past decades in Germany, Austria, Italy and the United States for their ability to resist downey mildew and powdery mildew, two scourges that keep growers on their tractors applying chemical sprays during wet seasons. They are also meant to be cold-hearty, resistant to the severe winters we’ve come to associate with “polar vortex” here in the Eastern U.S.
The hope for these disease-resistant, cold-hardy varieties is that growers will be able to drastically reduce chemical use in the vineyard and that the vines will be resilient against drastic weather extremes brought on by climate change.
Melissa and Parker Aellen are the third generation of Linganore Winecellars, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. They run the winery and a sister project called Simple Theory Wine Co. along with their fathers, Anthony and Eric Aellen, respectively.
In an average year, they might harvest about 270 tons of grapes from their 80 acres of vineyards at Linganore. After the April 21 freeze, they expect to have 30 tons. There won’t be any Cabernet Franc this year, or Barbera or San Marco. Their 4-year-old planting of Malbec was frosted down to the trunk, so there will be no crop this year or next. They will have some Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, but mostly from secondary and tertiary buds, so the grapes are ripening unevenly. August hasn’t been kind, with rains every few days dumping four inches of water on the vineyards, creating disease pressure and diluting the grapes.
In Maryland alone, the April 21 freeze is estimated to have cost wineries $14 million in lost retail sales, according to the Maryland Wineries Association. Like the Aellens, growers across Maryland and elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic are preparing for a diminished harvest, dealing with uneven ripening of secondary and tertiary bunches and now increased disease pressure from the August rains, while assessing impacts on future vintages and planning for replacing vines that were killed altogether.
At least at their experimental plot, the Aellens won’t have much replanting to do. The varieties there — Merlot Kanthus, Cabernet Volos, Helios, Monarch and Johanniter — survived the freeze, with just a few casualties. These were grouped together, Parker explained, suggesting that some rocky areas of the vineyard had prevented the vines from establishing their roots fully and left them vulnerable.
Also promising: The Aellens had sprayed the vines only once, early in the season to protect against black rot. In a normal year, they might have sprayed their vinifera vineyards six or seven times. Rain and humidity create conditions ripe for downey and powdery mildews, and sprays need to be applied after a substantial rainfall. The fungus-resistant varieties are thus easier and less expensive to grow, and have a lower environmental impact from chemical use.
While these vines look promising given the difficulties of 2026, the Aellens still don’t know what the wines will taste like, or whether consumers will buy them. We’ll look at that question in my next post.
Dave, good info....what is the vineyard elevation and slope and how cold did it actually get ? I've been growing wine grapes in the Blue Ridge for over 20 years. I'm at 1,200 feet with excellent soil and air drainage. I saw about 27 degrees and only lost a few baby vines. The rest of my crop looks good but of course it's not over till it's over.....
Living in the land of PiWi's (Germany) you would think that I would have had a lot of them, but in fact I never have. Many are permitted in the the various regions,. Regent, a red wine grape, is actually on a lot of restaurant wine lists. But your article has piqued my interest - I am from Maryland, after all - and I will order a some bottles to see if the taste matches the publicity.