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November 2018 WINES&VINES 19 Filter your wine on-premises with ATPGroup Mobile Services. We'll bring our state-of-the-art equipment for Lees Filtration or Cross-Flow Filtration to your winery. Best of all, we'll do all the work, all the cleanup. No muss, no fuss filtration. To find ouT whaT we can do for you, conTacT aTPgrouP aT (707) 836-6840 or online aT www.aTPgrouP.com aTP mobile Services ad_118-10-3_wandV While liens provide growers with recourse in the event of non-payment for delivered fruit that's in good shape, and crop insurance cov- ers fruit that was never harvested, rejected fruit falls into a grey area. Joe Wagner told Wines & Vines he plans to address the situation by requiring all growers to carry crop insurance. He's even willing to pay a premium to support the coverage. "[It's] a price I am happy to pay to keep all parties working toward the best wine possible even in difficult vintages where Mother Nature makes the crop unsellable," he said. In the meantime, he's putting together a compensation fund to address losses growers sustained in the current vintage. Details will be announced in the coming weeks. Changes to contracts Jesse Lyon, a partner with Davis Wright Tre- maine LLP in Portland, Ore., and chair of its food & beverage and agriculture practices, told Wines & Vines he expects to see greater interest in crop insurance and tighter con- tract wording regarding smoke taint. "Going forward, we'll … [see] more ro- bust and specified negotiation over smoke taint," Lyon said. "People have pretty nor- mal standards for things like how much of a load can be material other than grapes, and what are the target ranges for pH and TA and brix, but we don't have that kind of science yet and accepted standards for smoke taint." This is something Moore would like to see the Oregon Wine Board lead, starting with the Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris varieties. "Come up with a number, come up with some metric that everybody has to agree to, so that the contracts are universal," he said. Moore, for his part, is looking to the fu- ture. While one winery was left looking for a home for 1,200 tons, and another saw 170 tons of grapes rejected, he has been able to salvage most of his crop. Some will end up under the planned Solidarity label, while Chardonnay grapes picked in early October will go to Joe Dobbes for vinification into bulk wine. "In our instance, we're more or less whole after this rollercoaster, but that certainly isn't the case for a lot of wineries," Moore said. Research will have a role to play, Lyon added. The risks warmer winters present icewine producers have led researchers in Ontario to develop models for assessing risks to those wines, for example. Meanwhile, ongoing projects led by researchers Tom Collins at Washington State University and Wesley Zan- dberg at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, as well as projects in Oregon and California, are providing a baseline for the risk from smoke taint as well as insights into how to forecast and mitigate the damage. "If you had asked industry to write big checks to support smoke taint research 10 years ago, that would have been just another pie-in-the-sky request," Lyon said. "This shows the importance of the California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia industries having really important and ongoing multi- year research projects, because they do drive business outcomes." —Peter Mitham "If you're going to claim that you can reject it for smoke taint … you can't be the one to determine that any more than I can, the grower." –Michael Moore, Quail Run Vineyards WINE INDUSTRY NEWS