US: Quality Wine Grapes in the Sierra Foothills

(Wines&Vines) - “Quality Collaborations: Teaming Together to Improve Foothill Wines” was the theme of Foothill Grape Day 2013, held June 6 in El Dorado County at Cielo Estate winery in Shingle Springs. The University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) Central Sierra office organizes the annual educational meeting for growers and vintners in the four Sierra Foothill counties of El Dorado, Amador, Calaveras and Tuolumne.

During her opening remarks, UCCE viticulture farm advisor Lynn Wunderlich set the tone for the program, saying, “What I work on as a farm advisor here in the Foothills is to target quality. We don’t have the large vineyard acreages found in other regions where yield improvement can be an issue, so we need to focus our winegrowing on quality production, and we can do this by collaborating with growers and wineries locally to improve production practices.”

Wunderlich is working collaboratively on four research projects with Foothill growers, who provide vineyard sites for the research, and with other UC specialists who provide expertise in project development and management: early leaf pulling for Botrytis management, the installation of four weather stations in Amador County to enable growers to use the Gubler-Thomas powdery mildew risk-assessment index, evapotranspiration (ET) slope measurements for irrigation management and soil survey decision support tools for Foothill soils.