Essex County grape growers are doing all they can to save their vineyards from the recent cold weather.
Temperatures dipped dangerously low Tuesday night and into the early hours of Wednesday morning, putting grape buds in danger.
Staff were up all night at Coopers Hawk Vineyards on Iler Road in Harrow, using large fans to keep the air moving.
Owner Tom O'Brien says there are four vineyards with big fans and they were all on to keep the cold air from freezing the grape buds.
"We started running our machines around 2 a.m. when it hit -17C. These cold instances can happen in a second, it's not a prolonged cold that kills the buds on the plant, it's an instant cold. If you hit -21C, you're going to get damage right away," he says.
O'Brien says you could see the fans lift the cold.
"Early in the morning you could see an ice cloud over the vineyard about maybe 20 feet high and the wind machines are blowing, you can actually see that ice cloud being blown away. What it does, it draws down warmer air from up above and replaces that cold air on the ground," he says.
O'Brien says there have been worse winters that have done more damage.
"In this kind of weather we're more worried about the buds. We had the bad polar vortex back in 2014, we had -29C and it killed, not only the buds, it killed the trunks," he says. "In this weather we're worried about the buds surviving. The buds are basically the wine, the grapes are going to grow this year into the wine we're going to sell two years from now."
O'Brien says the next big worry is a hard frost after the buds have formed in the spring — that would also kill them.