Bell's Nursery has several locations in Anchorage with thousands of square feet in greenhouse space. The bulk of Bell's business comes from hanging baskets of flowers, poinsettias, and the thousands of pounds of cucumbers and tomatoes it grows and sells annually. But Mike Mosesian, farmer and owner of Bell's Nursery, is also trying his hand at a more unusual Alaska crop: wine grapes.
"There's a few wineries up here, but they make it out of concentrate, which makes an inferior product," he said. " It's like how you make orange juice out of frozen concentrate."
A fourth-generation farmer with a graduate degree in viticulture and a minor in chemistry from the University of California Davis, Mosesian has the know-how needed to grow wine grapes indoors. His Armenian family immigrated to the United States from Turkey at the beginning of the 20th century. He says his great-grandfather was one of the farmers who started Sun-Maid raisins in Fresno, Calif., in the 1920s, and his father owned and operated a thousand acres of California farmland growing table and wine grapes.
Mosesian decided that he could make a superior Alaska wine by growing the grapes himself indoors. What makes a great wine "is hot days and cool nights," he says. According to Mosesian, Alaska is the only state in the United States that does not have a wine-grape winery because it's too cold to ripen grapes outside.
"You have to put them in a hoop house or greenhouse for them to ripen. And since these greenhouses are somewhat warm in the winter, it made for an ideal environment."
Mosesian is teaching himself winemaking and making wine at home in his basement. He doesn't have a license to sell wine, but he can give it away or drink it. To make wine production in Alaska a viable industry, Mosesian says he would need partners to go in on 10 acres of land on which to build inexpensive greenhouses. Mosesian says he could propagate the grapes from the cuttings he already has at Bell's Nursery; they would just need a location with the right soil.
"We could have a winery if people were interested in going to an area like Point MacKenzie or Wasilla -- we could have the first wine grape winery in Alaska," he says.
Read more: Tomato grower toys with the idea of a winery in Alaska
Watch this video on Vimeo or YouTube, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more great videos. Contact Tara Young at tara(at)alaskadispatch.com.
Alaska Dispatch Publishing