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G r AP e G ro WING Grapegrower Interview: Jerry Lohr Bernie Turgeon were among the early players in the Arroyo Seco region of Monterey County. It was something of a risk, because commercial viticulture in the county was only about 10 years old. The partners opened the Turgeon & Lohr Winery in San Jose in 1974. A Lohr bought out his partner about a decade later and went on to purchase land in Paso Robles, where he planted grapes such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, which had proved to be difficult in Arroyo Seco. He also owns a vineyard in the Napa Valley. J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines currently has 3,700 acres of vineyard in California. "Where Chardonnay and Riesling would ripen in the area, and Pinot Noir would ripen, it was difficult to properly ripen Cabernet." —Jerry Lohr, J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines Lohr, who has a master's degree in civil engineering from Stanford University, was a founder of Wine Vision and the National Grape and Wine Initiative. He is a former director of the Wine Institute, four-time president of the Monterey County Vintners and Growers' Association and former chairman of the Paso Robles Vintners and Growers Association. Lohr received a lifetime achievement award from the California State Fair in 2007, and in 2008 he was named Wine Industry Person of the Year by the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance. Lohr is this year's Merit Award honoree at the American Society for Enology and Viti- culture's national conference. Wines & Vines: Arroyo Seco was a largely unproven viticultural area when you planted grapes there in the early 1970s. Why did you decide to plant grapes there, and what were the results? Jerry Lohr: We traveled to Napa, we traveled to Sonoma, we traveled to Lodi. As I looked at the various areas, it seemed Napa had quite a bit of variation in soils. It was pretty warm. Sonoma was kind of scattered all around. Lodi was a huge area 56 Wines & Vines JUne 2011 lthough Jerry Lohr grew up on a farm in South Dakota, when he settled in California he worked as a developer and homebuilder before making the move back into farming. This time it was winegrapes. In the early 1970s, he and then-business partner ASEV honoree opens up about matching vines to location By Laurie Daniel but seemed to be primarily taken with Tokay grapes. Because we live in Saratoga, 50 miles south of San Francisco, the most accessible area was Monterey or the Salinas Valley. So as I began to kind of narrow it down, it looked to me as if right in this Greenfield area there was the combination of this Region 2 cli- mate that Winkler and Amerine had conceived and the gravelly, well-drained soils. In Greenfield, I liked the layout. I could see that wells were there. They were growing lettuce in spring and summer and peppers in the fall, and peppers need good drainage. There were quite a bit of root crops at that time—carrots and sugar beets—