Good Vibrations for Bad Insects
Other than the second coming of Carrie Nation and the rebirth of Prohibition, few things scare California vintners like the glassy winged sharpshooter.
No, it’s not the latest drone flying high overhead to blow up suspected terrrorists. It’s an insect about as long as your thumbnail, native to the southeastern United States and northeastern Mexico, that transmits Pierce’s Disease, which attacks grapevines and infests them with a bacterium that halts the flow of water within the vine, killing it within two years. To date, there is no known cure.
The nasty little suckers have already infested vineyards in Southern California, the Central Valley and even Santa Clara County, causing multiple millions of dollars of damage and the allocation of millions more dollars to combat the pest.
But now the solution may lie in the invention of a group of European scientists, who have figured out a way to disrupt the sex lives of the pests that threaten their vineyards, the grapevine leafhopper. You see, male and female leafhoppers communicate their readiness to get it on (as well as their location) by sending subtle vibrations, which are transmitted to the vines they’re inhabiting.
So the scientists developed an electromagnetic “shaker” that attaches to the wires holding up vines and sends out its own vibrations, vibrations that confuse the insects and prevent them from getting together to consummate their relationship, also preventing them from spreading their destructive bacterium.
It’s an invention so promising that the USDA has asked the scientists to work on rejiggering it to vibrate the sex life right out of the glassy winged sharpshooter. If it works, they won’t be shooting much of anything.
Robotics May Help Turn (Less) Water Into Wine
Wineries, of course, don’t really turn water into wine. But unless you’re the Son of God, it takes from four to six gallons of water to produce one gallon of wine. It’s not so much the actual watering of vines—grapevines are actually pretty drought-tolerant and produce better-quality grapes when stressed. It’s in the production process—washing grapes and the equipment used to process them.
Given California’s ongoing drought and the likelihood it won’t be ending anytime soon, every gallon of water is a precious thing. So students at UC Davis’s Department of Viticulture and Enology are putting technology and robotics to work to conserve as much water as possible.
Among their innovations, which will be put to the test in the Department’s own winery, are a “clean in place” system to scour the insides of fermentation tanks. Currently that cleaning is done by workers wielding a hose inside the tanks. The UC Davis CIP system is automated, with a program limiting the amount of water used to the absolute minimum for proper sanitation.
Students have also designed a robot to physically push grape peels to spots where they can then be flushed down drains, rather than using vast amounts of water to position the peels. Recycling water may be neither new nor tekkie but it’s also an important part of the UC Davis plan. Students working to determine the best way to reuse water from the wine production and winery cleaning processes to irrigate vineyards. They’ve also installed tanks around the campus to capture rainwater, which can then be used by the winery.
If everything works as hoped, that four to six gallons of water for every gallon of wine could be reduced to one for one. Can I get an “Amen”?
Reality Show Brings Survivor to Wine Biz
Whose wine will reign supreme?
That’s the question that will be asked and answered in “Best Bottle,” a reality TV series scheduled to begin production in late August in Sonoma and Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
The show will feature teams of wannabe “rock star” winemakers from California and Oregon who will engage in a “brutal” state vs. state battle designed to measure their “physical and mental endurance, a native intelligence, and shrewdness” in crafting their “best bottle” of wine. Each team will be led by an established winemaker who will coach his or her charges through the competition.
The winning “Cellar Rat,” has contestants have been dubbed, will be judged by a panel of cork dorks and views, and will earn the Golden Grapes Trophy, a grand prize of $100,000, a new car, and a “lucrative” wine-making deal that lets King Rat bottle one vintage under the Best Bottle label and tout it with a specially designed advertising campaign.
The show is the creation of the folks behind the Best Bottle wine club, an online wine-purchasing site, who’ve brought in other wine, media and marketing professionals to get the show off the ground. When and where it will air, nobody knows yet. (Or at least they’re not saying.) But keep your corkscrews handy.
Hitler’s Stash of Gourmet Goodies Discovered
Adolph Hitler was not exactly the life of the party. No meat, no smoking, no drinking.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the lure of the finer vices in life to those of, ah. . . less puritanical natures. And so it is that in 1944, when Berlin was being hammered by Allied bombers and Der Fuhrer’s “Thousand Year Reich” was shrinking down to a few square blocks in the center of town, he had the SS move a stash of good food, booze and smokes numbered in the hundreds of boxes out of the capital city and into a villa on a sprawling estate just north of Dresden.
What was left of the giant cache of champagne, cognac, coffee, chocolate, butter, cigarettes and more was discovered in a secret underground chamber in the Marcolinipalais Villa at the Wasserschloss Moritzburg estate by German chef-restaurateur Silvio Steizer, who was renovating the villa for a new restaurant. A ledger also found on the property detailed the goodies, which had been pilfered from all over Europe and sent to the villa for safekeeping.
The food didn’t last long after the estate was overrun by the Red Army in 1945, but for some reason the sticky-fingered Commies left an undisclosed number of bottles of champagne and Hennessey cognac, which have been donated to historians for, ahem. . . research.
So at least some good will come out of them.
Wine Analysts Peer Into Their Crystal Ball
More Americans are drinking more wine, with Millenials and women increasing their clout in the marketplace, according to a roster of recent studies on the U.S. wine market.
According to the Wine Market Council, American wine drinkers—approximately 40 percent of adults—quaffed 302 million cases of wine in 2014, up from 298 million cases the previous year. For the first time, women wine drinkers outnumber men, comprising 54 percent of wine consumers. Millenials, defined as those born from 1977 to 1994, make up 29 percent of American wine consumers but drink 34 percent of all wine consumed.
The vast majority of wine consumed in this country—81 percent—goes down the throats of what the council dubs “high-frequency wine drinkers,” approximately 30 million Americans who drink wine more than once a week. Overall wine consumption of that group is up 35 percent over last year. Not surprisingly, given Millenials’ affinity for technology and social media, Facebook and Twitter play important roles in their wine drinking, with 62 percent of Millenials and 40 percent of Gen X wine consumers using Facebook to communicate about wine, and roughly half those numbers using Twitter.
Interestingly, though Millenial consumers are generally more adventurous wine drinkers than their Baby Boomer counterparts, more than half say they consider wine reviews “very” or “extremely” important when it comes to choosing a wine.
When it comes to women wine drinkers, the stereotype of women as gravitating to Chardonnay and sweet wines turns out not to be true. In fact, according to a California study, both men and women chose Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot as their top wine choices, divurging at No. 3, when men preferred Pinot Noir and women White Zinfandel. There was also agreement between the sexes on the occasions and motivations for wine drinking. The biggest difference in men and women’s wine drinking habits was drinking alone—men’s wine consumption remained steady, while women said they tended to drink less when not socializing with friends and family.
Texas Cotton Giving Way to Grapes
Texas is renowned for its barbecued brisket, steaks the size of manhole covers and Lone Star beer.
Its wines, however. . . not so much.
That, however, may be changing, as Texas farmers are replacing fields of what has long been the state’s cash crop, cotton, with. . . wait for it. . . wine grapes. And not high-yielding but mediocre varietals good only for producing oceans of industrial-style plonk. Though initial plantings were the usual vinous suspects like Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, today savvy Texas winegrowers are planting grapes better suited to Texas’s extreme hot-and-cold climate, grapes like Tempranillo, Sangiovese and Viognier.
In fact, the Texas wine industry has grown so dramatically that in the years from 2010 to 2014, wine production has almost reached 2 million cases, a 36 percent increase that brings in some $2 million a year to the state’s economy, according to the research firm of Wines Vines Analytics.
The reasons for the boom in Texas wine production are twofold: money and water. Texas has been in the grip of a five-year drought that has cost farmers and ranchers an estimated $8 billion. Wine grapes require a lot less scarce water than cotton yet one acre of vineyards can produce the same revenue as 40 acres of cotton, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal,
And while popular knowledge of Texas history is pretty much confined to stories of cowboys, cattle rustlers, oilmen and right-wing politicians, wine is also deeply rooted in the state’s past. Wine grapes were first planted in Texas in the 1650s, 100 years before California, and horticultural research done there helped find the phylloxera-resistant rootstock that save the French wine industry in the mid-1800s. Today Texas is home to almost 300 wineries, up from 54 only 10 years ago.