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UNIFIED PREVIEW Nick Frey Hans C. Walter-Peterson Lise Asimont Leticia Chacón-Rodriguez Joe Whitney Big Event Sets Session Themes in Virginia learn from the success of a brewer in Chico, Calif.? While the wine industry is divided by regional and economic differences, the organizers of this year's Unified Wine & Grape Symposium are attempting to span those disparities at the annual event sched- uled Jan. 24-26 in Sacramento, Calif. "We're looking to have another good program that's really applicable to growers and winemakers across the country," said Nick Frey, the chair of Unified's program committee and president of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission. "We're in a business that's truly a global business." In addition to the economic discussion, Frey said Unified's educational sessions will have a strong focus on dealing with challenging weather—an issue many growers had to confront this past harvest. The morning session Jan. 24, "Qual- ity Grapes and Wine in a Challenging Climate," should draw the attention of growers and winemakers who may be separated by terroir, varietal choice and methodology but are all subject to the whims of nature. "Weather events have been pretty extreme, and someone seems to be getting hit every year," Frey said. "We need to be learning what it is that can be done to mitigate those things that could otherwise really affect a vintage." W 24 Wines & Vines DeCeMBeR 201 1 hat can a Washington grower learn from how a New York vineyard man- ager dealt with an intense rainstorm as his grapes approached ripeness? And how can the owner of a winery "it's just a great opportunity to network when you get 10,000-plus people in one place for several days." —Nick Frey, Sonoma County Winegrape Commission Lessons from a challenging vintage Of course, there isn't a panacea to combat adverse weather across the nation, said Hans C. Walter-Peterson, the viticulture extension specialist with the Finger Lakes Grape Program of the Cornell Coopera- tive Extension. Walter-Peterson will be moderating the general session about growing in a challenging climate. "This has been an incredibly challeng- ing year across the board, on both sides of the Rockies," Walter-Peterson said. He anticipates that growers and winemak- ers will learn from how their colleagues handled the challenges they faced as well as learn more about how vineyard dis- eases can spread. Walter-Peterson said he hopes dur- ing the main session and later breakout events that those at the symposium will be able to identify specific areas where winemakers and growers don't know how to protect quality. Then, researchers could take those issues to funding organizations to hone academic research for the greatest benefit of the industry. "One important piece of Unified Symposium to focus on adverse weather, global trends By Andrew Adams this is how much do we know and what don't we know," he said. Lise Asimont, director of grower rela- tions for Francis Ford Coppola Winery, helped organize Unified this year and said she's particularly excited about the weather sessions because this past harvest was the most difficult in her career. But she added that organizers had a philosophical change in planning the event in that they wanted to keep attend- ees talking about significant issues while they're at Unified. Asimont will help lead a discussion Jan. 25 about communicating quality issues from the winery to growers. Compli- cated quality determinants like a total phenolic analysis can be lost on growers, she said, when they're presented with a chart depicting numbers on total phenols, anthocyanins and tannins. Asimont said she and the winemak- ers at Francis Ford Coppola have taken steps to explain what those numbers mean or to translate the science of qual- ity analysis. "We describe what each number means and what we think they did in that vine- yard that year to get those numbers," she said. (See "Assay in Real Time" in Wines & Vines' October 2010 issue.) The result has been growers coming in to the winery eager to discuss how an approach to leaf pulling has bumped their vineyard's color numbers in the right direction. Asimont will participate in the session with Francis Ford Coppola winemaker Corey Beck and grower Scott McLeod, who tends vines at high eleva- tion in El Dorado County.