Agricultural antifreeze? Sask. researchers say spray could help wine grapes handle cold better
CBC
An agricultural biotech group based out of the University of Saskatchewan wants to help protect wine grapes from the cold, and that's welcome news to vineyard owners across the country.
U of S chemist Naveen Diddi has been examining a round glass flask filled with an orange-coloured substance containing abscisic acid — or ABA: a naturally-occurring plant hormone, and says research shows it's also a key ingredient in keeping wine grape crops alive.
"It's fluffy," Diddi said. "It sticks to the glass."
Diddi is part of a team with ABAzyne BioScience, an agricultural biotech company based at the U of S, that's using ABA in a solution that can be sprayed on the crops to make them more resistant to frigid winter temperatures.
ABA closes a plant's stomata — the tiny pore-like structures on its leaves and stem. It helps defend the plant from cold temperatures. ABAzyne's spray prolongs ABA, which can naturally degrade overtime.
Sue Abrams, chief scientist with ABAzyne, said experiments using the spray on wine grape crops in Ontario show promising results.
"Those grape vines, when sprayed with [our] solution,... were able to be 5 C [to] 6 C more tolerant to freezing temperatures," said Abrams. "And that's enough to get them through the winter."
The research in Ontario was done by Jim Willwerth at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ont.
Willwerth, an assistant professor of biological sciences who studies grape vines, said the spray not only kept his crop hardier to the cold, but also kept them dormant during periods of warmer weather in the winter.
ABAzyne research shows some varieties of grapes stayed dormant for an additional 16 days during warm spells, once the spray was applied.
"Plants are really responsive to climate," said Willwerth. "As soon as they start to have weeks of warm weather, it'll cause them to start to lose that cold tolerance."
Ben-Min Chang, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Summerland, B.C., said warm weather in winter triggers the plants to wake up from dormancy.
He said temperature extremes driven by climate change in B.C. this winter were detrimental to wine grape crops.
"We had ... a super warm winter and suddenly [a] cold snap [came]," said Chang. "For grape vines, there's no time for them to get used to that sudden change."
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