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G r AP e G ro W in G Grapegrower Interview DeborAh Golino Director of foundation nursery discusses new varieties and clones By Laurie Daniel ed States wine industry. A key function of FPS is the importation and quarantine of grapevines, which ensures that nurseries and wineries can get the grape varieties they want without the threat of foreign pests or diseases. A Golino graduated from the University of California, Riverside, in 1974 and went on to earn her master's degree and Ph.D. at the same university. After extensive work in plant pathology and research, Golino in 1994 became director of FPS, where she is more involved in service and outreach to the wine industry. She is also a leading expert on leafroll virus. Wines & Vines: What prompts Founda- tion Plant Services to import a particular grape variety or clone? Deborah Golino: We import grapes for a variety of reasons. Most important to the wine industry is probably the cus- tom importation we do for individuals, nurseries and wineries when they want to bring in a new winegrape variety or clone. Because our center is a self-supporting activity at UC Davis, we arrange for these imports through use of business contracts. The cost can vary from $1,500 to $6,500, and the work takes a minimum of two years. Normally, a contract customer has a relationship with someone abroad who is willing to provide the desired variety or selection. Most of those imports remain in the ownership of the importer, who pays all the expenses for their testing and care. The most well-known proprietary mate- rial in our collection is probably the EN- TAV-INRA trademarked collection. EN- TAV (L'Établissement National Technique pour l'Amélioration de la Viticulture) and INRA (Institut National de la Recherche 44 Wines & Vines FeBRUARY 201 1 s director of Foundation Plant Services at the University of California, Davis, Deborah Golino is on the front lines of making new grape clones and varieties available to the Unit- Agronomique) are the two institutions authorized in France to create and certify grape clonal selections for commercial use. FPS began discussions in the mid-1990s with ENTAV director Robert Boidron. It took a number of visits between their center in Domaine de l'Espiguette and ours in Davis before a plan developed to allow marketing of these sought-after clones in the United States. All ENTAV-INRA trademarked material in our foundation collection is proprietary and owned by ENTAV. They, in turn, provide licenses to some nurseries in the United States. In addition to this and other proprietary collections, we have support from the California grape nursery industry for our public program—that's the large collec- tion of grapes (more than 700 varieties and many clones of the major winegrape varieties) to which we like to add whenev- er the possibility arises. I'll tell you about a few of the interesting shipments that we have brought in to the public collection in recent years: The general partners of Tablas Creek Winery, Robert Haas and the Perrin family, arranged in 2004 to ship to FPS all of the Châteauneuf- du-Pape AOC-approved varieties that were not already in the United States. This included Vaccarèse, Terret Noir, Muscardin, Cinsault, Picardin, Clairette and Bourbou- lenc. The vines came from Château de Beaucastel, which the Perrin family owns. This means that soon we will have all of the 14 Châ- teauneuf-du-Pape varieties available for use here. Because the selections came from a working vineyard, there was virus in most of them, so it has been necessary to perform microshoot tip cul- ture therapy upon them. The Terret Noir, Picardin and Clairette Blanche selections have all been released from quarantine and should be commercially available CAliForniA UC Davis Foundation Plant Services Sacramento Napa Pacific Ocean San Stockton Francisco CALIFORNIA soon. We expect the others to be released in the next year or two. Another group of new winegrape variet- ies has come to us from our collaborators in Croatia, Dr. Edi Maletic and Dr. Ivan Pejic of the University of Zagreb. These are the scientists who worked with UC Davis professor Carole Meredith to discover that NV