Wines & Vines

48 WINES&VINES Collector's Edition COLLECTOR'S EDITION David Lett Demonstrated potential of Willamette Valley Pinot Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley of Oregon traces its origins and owes much of its renown to David Lett (1939-2008), who planted the Willamette Valley's first Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris vines. Working with 3,000 cuttings hauled north from California in a horse trailer, he es- tablished The Eyrie Vineyards near McMinnville in the Dundee Hills. Together with his wife, Diana, he produced his first Pinot Noir in 1970, but it was the winery's 1975 South Block Re- serve Pinot Noir that showed the world – first in Paris in 1979, then a year later in Beaune – what Oregon could do. Oregon kept doing it, too, with Eyrie's success setting the standard for winemakers to come. Lett's first apprentice was David Adelsheim, and many more well-known names followed – David Lake, Joel Myers and Véronique Drouhin, among them. Lett not only trained a generation, he also defined the char- acter of Pinot Noir for Oregon, a legacy the industry continues to cherish and defend. Machine Harvesting American invention improved with European engineering During and after World War II, labor for har- vesting agricultural commodities was in short supply. Dr. A.J. Winkler, professor of viticulture and enology at what would become the Uni- versity of California, Davis, began work in 1953 on developing a grape harvester adapted from the horizontal cutter-bar harvester that worked well with grains. Unfortunately, the cutter-bar harvester required special trellising, hand labor to shoot position, and then damaged both the grapes and the vines. Meanwhile, at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., viticulturist Nelson Shaulis and E. Stanley Shepardson in the agricultural engineering de- partment combined their teams and designed an over-the-row vertical harvester that shook the grapes off the vines. At the same time in the early 1960s, grapegrowers Roy Orton and his uncle Max Orton in Ripley, N.Y., created a hor- izontal-action machine that beat the trellis rather than shaking the vines. Chisholm-Ryder Co. in Niagara Falls, N.Y., cooperated with the engineering of the harvesters at Cornell and became the producer of the first commercially available grape harvesters. The first commercial use in New York took place in 1968. In the ensuing years, the grape harvester has evolved. European companies, such as Gregoire, Pellenc and Braud, have increasingly automated the grape harvester. Harvesters can now run on autopilot, utilize geopositioning, pick grapes more gently all day and all night, maneuver on hillsides, blow off material other than grapes, destem, and report Brix, total acidity and pH levels. Jerry Lohr A vineyard pioneer in California's Central Coast When J. Lohr Winery founder Jerry Lohr and his then-business partner bought nearly 300 acres in 1972 in Monterey County, Calif., and planted grapes, it was a risky move. Commercial viticulture there was only about 10 years old, and the results hadn't always been promising. They planted 11 varieties and, after a few years, settled on a few, mostly whites, that would per- form well in the cool, windy conditions of what would become the Arroyo Seco AVA. For reds like Cabernet Sauvignon, Lohr knew he needed a warmer spot. His search took him to Paso Robles, where he bought land in the mid-1980s. When the Wine Enthusiast named him an "Amer- ican wine legend" in 2016, the magazine said, "What Robert Mondavi was to Napa Valley, Jerry Lohr is to the Central Coast." J. Lohr farms 4,000 acres of vineyards in Monterey County, Paso Robles and Napa Valley; the vineyards, as well as wineries in Paso Ro- bles, Greenfield and San Jose, are certified by the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alli- ance. Lohr was a founder of Wine Vision and the National Grape and Wine Initiative and has been a major benefactor of viticulture and enology programs at the University of Califor- nia, Davis, and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Managing Malolactic Researchers didn't solve the mystery of MLF until the 1950s One of the most important natural processes in winemaking, the conversion of malic acid to lactic acid through the work of bacteria, was a mysteri- ous process that winemakers had little control of until the second half of the 20th century. Louis Pasteur in the 19th century figured out how yeast achieves primary fermentation, but in the 1950s winemakers around the world had little traction on the malolactic (MLF) conversion. Practical work to isolate bacteria strains and inoculate wine with them was conducted at the University of California, Davis and at Han- zell Vineyards in Sonoma County in 1959, where winemaker Brad Webb, working with UC Davis professor of microbiology John In- graham, performed what was probably the first induced MLF in California from a pure culture of a strain of a bacterium (later named Oeno- coccus oeni). It was ML 34, isolated from a tank at the Louis M. Martini Winery in St. Helena, Calif., Ingraham said. Later they learned that in France, E. Peynaud and S. Domercq had used a similar approach and also been successful, probably before they had. Later Maynard Am- erine, a master of enological literature, noted that M. Gomes, J.V.F. da Silva Babo, and A.F. Guimarais had been successful in 1956. The major research and teaching interests of Ralph Kunkee (1927-2011) at UC Davis focused on ML fermentation, wine yeast and the sources and controls of microbiological spoilages of wines. Kunkee's work on MLF helped bring understanding to this bacterial activity and how to control it. Dr. Ann Noble Developed sensory evaluation as a discipline Ann Noble is a sensory chemist and retired pro- fessor from the University of California, Davis, who taught sensory evaluation to future wine- makers and developed the wine "Aroma Wheel." During her time at Davis's Department of Viti- culture and Enology, Noble invented the Aroma —continues on page 50

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