Warming lights being tested at Kelowna vineyard doing their job as temperatures plunge

Things are looking good at a vineyard in South Kelowna that is testing an infrared light heating system to protect vines from extremely cold temperatures.

“We’ve had them on for the last cold spell, basically, straight for seven days,” explains Quails’ Gate winemaker Rowan Stewart when talking about the Frolight system installed at the outset of this winter in a small section of the 200-acre property along Stewart Road.

“This cold snap has given us the data we need,” he says. “So, we will probably be digesting the data over the next couple of days with our vineyard team, and then, if we don’t see any glaring faults in the way we collected it, we are probably going to move ahead with a larger install.”

He says the lights have been warming the vines by an average of about four degrees Celsius. That should be enough to keep them from suffering permanent damage if overnight lows were to drop below -20 C. It’s unclear if it would be enough to protect the plants at temperatures below -25 C, as we saw in many parts of the Okanagan last winter.

Quails’ Gate is one of the first in Canada to try the system that was developed in Europe. This trial should provide the manufacturer with new data. These are some of the coldest temperatures the product has been exposed to.

Frolights are designed to turn on automatically if the temperature drops below -10 C. Stewart says it has been so cold this past week, with temperatures dipping below -15 C, that they have been manually switching the system on at night and off in the morning because sunshine during the day has been enough to keep the vines from suffering lasting damage.

“Hopefully, they’re excited by it. You know, we’ve got to talk to them about updating the software, but that should be pretty simple. Hopefully, they can do that, and we get some larger scale installs going,” adds Stewart.

He says since Castanet first reported on the project last month, there has been a lot of interest in what Quails’ Gate is doing.

“It’s certainly got a lot of people in the Okanagan/B.C. area excited.

“We got a few calls from everything from people with their own vines that they’re growing out in Manitoba sharing their experiences to people that work for large science corporations offering equipment and monitoring software.”

If the lights are rolled out on a larger scale, Stewart says it will probably be at a different vineyard and target a more cold-sensitive grape variety like Syrah.

Quails’ Gate, like many other wineries in the Okanagan and Similkameen, suffered significant bud and vine damage in last winter’s extreme cold. It has replanted about 60 acres of vines so far, with another 70 acres set for this year and 50 more to be replanted in future seasons.