Japanese Beetles Affect on Finger Lakes Wine
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Photo Taken By Jesse Martin (2008) |
Dave Stamp grew up on Lakewood Vineyards, but he's never seen Japanese beetles this bad.
“It’s a pest that is growing worse and worse, that we're going to have to deal with as we go into more years,” says Dave Stamp.
Last year's mild winter allowed many beetles to survive the cold. That's why this summer they started chomping on the vineyards earlier than ever before.
Japanese beetles don't go after the grapes. They go after the leaves. You can see here where they just destroyed these leaves.
Stamp says he held out for as long as he could, but when he started noticing thousands of little holes on his vines, he finally brought out the pesticides.
“We wait until it is to a point where it is actually causing damage enough that warrant us to go and do something,” says Stamp.
John Leidenfrost, the owner of Leidenfrost Vineyards uses the same pesticide called Seven.
“There was an outburst of them,” says John Leidenfrost. “Instead of letting them get too out of hand, we do away with them,”
The people we spoke with say the spraying of pesticides in the vineyards doesn't concern them.
“Does that bother you? Or are you okay with that?” asks Katie Graham.
“I'm okay with that,” says Kim Church of Melbourne Florida.
“The wine still tastes great,” says Carl Medura of Westminster, Maryland.
Even after a thorough dousing with pesticides, the beetles undoubtedly return. Stamp plans to spray again next week, but he says the pesticides aren't what will affect this year's wine.
“It gets on the grapes, but we'll have rainstorms to wash it off,” says Stamp.
The wine will taste different because of all these little holes the beetles have chewed out of the leaves.
“The leaves are of course like the factories to help the grapes produce sugars and grow and ripen the fruit,” says Stamp.
So when the leaves are gone, the grapes don't get sugar, and that's what might make this year's wine a little less sweet.
The Lakewood Vineyards Manager says setting up Japanese beetle traps on seventy five acres in his vineyard would not be practical and would be far too expensive. He also says even organic vineyards spray with chemicals.