Adam Tolmach is working outside, positioning the shoots from the vines at his property in Ventura County, on land that his grandfather purchased a half century earlier. The owner and winemaker at Ojai Vineyard doesn’t just make wine, he nurtures every grape, and says it was heartbreaking when the original vines he planted here died from a disease spread by insects.
"In '81, I planted a vineyard, and we actually lost that vineyard to a disease that's called Pierce's disease. It's an insect that carries a bacterium that clogs up the water conductive tissues of the grapes," he explained.
It’s a problem that Tolmach says will only get worse with climate change.
"With global warming, the night time low temperatures are getting higher, and so the disease is spreading further. It's been around in California for some time. It's spreading even further that people have found it as far north as Humboldt County, which is quite far north," he said.
Determined to keep his vineyard organic and free from pesticides, the solution for him is a grape which has been developed to be resistant to Pierce’s Disease - but that also needed to make good wine!
"This is a little bit of a story of how hybrids can help us avoid diseases without using insecticides. I mean, we could have planted a vineyard and used a lot of insecticides to try to stave off the disease. But that's not really what we're interested in. And we've never used them here. So we were really wanting to do it completely organically, and so we're able to grow these grapes organically and they're healthy and they're happy and they're distinctive in their difference," he said.
Tolmach grows the vines, developed by Dr. Andrew Walker at UC Davies here, making wine from grapes with less familiar names like Ambulo Blanc or Paseante Noir.
"What Walker did was take Vitis Vinifera, which is basically the European grape varieties that we all know as wine - things like Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay and such. And he crossed it with a native of the southwest called Vitis Arizonica, and that carries the resistance to Pierce's disease. And so after the first cross, it was 50/50. But he crossed the Vinifera back again and again until he got to 97% Vinifera. What that means is that these wines taste very much like what we're familiar with as far as wines that we drink," he explained.
This area might not have the commercial pull of Napa Valley - or even the Santa Ynez Valley - for wine, but Tolmach is one of the winemakers putting them on the map.
"That's what my life's work is here - trying to kind of capture the character of a vineyard in the bottle, and that's the craft I work on," he said.
But what would his grandfather, the original owner here, make of his success in the wine industry?
"Well, he was a teetotaler. And so I don't know," he laughed.
