Vintner Savors Grape Expectations : Viniculture: Winery in San Pasqual Valley hopes to reap prestige and profit from its planting of Napa Valley Chardonnay vines.

In the greening hills of San Pasqual Valley, a San Diego city agricultural preserve south of Escondido, the Thomas Jaeger Winery is adding a bit of class.

The winery, a successor to the home-grown San Pasqual Winery started in 1973 by a group of local wine fanciers, weds the know-how and the experience of established Northern California vintners with local enthusiasm and the sunny San Diego climate.

On Thursday, Thomas Jaeger workers began planting 13,000 vines on 20 hillside acres, the first major grape planting in San Diego County in 10 years. It will be 1993 before the vines bear fruit and the winery can ferment and bottle its initial Chardonnay crop.

Paul Thomas, an early partner in the San Pasqual winery, and William Jaeger, the latest addition, think the match is a good one that should, at long last, yield a profit. Thomas, a San Diego commercial real-estate developer, joined in the venture back in the 1970s when attorney Milton Fredman and Associate Appeal Court Justice Charles Froehlich first started the vineyard with little more than a love of wine and a city land lease.

William Jaeger, owner of two Northern California wineries--Rutherford Hill and Freemark Abbey--teamed with Thomas to acquire the San Pasqual Winery when it went bankrupt after a disastrous infestation of Pearce’s disease, an insect-carried virus, killed a good part of the winery’s vines.

Doug Braun, wine maker and enologist at Thomas Jaeger Winery, said Pearce’s disease would have been a death sentence for the operation no matter whether amateurs or professionals had been in charge.

When Thomas and Jaeger took over the winery and vineyards in 1987, the new owners abandoned the lowland vineyards that had been devastated by the disease and planted on the hillsides around the winery on San Pasqual Road, where hardy root stock from a Napa nursery and know-how from decades of wine growing hopefully will prevent another outbreak of the disease.

A $400,000 expenditure on the new 20-acre planting is expected to reap both profits and prestige for the San Pasqual winery, Thomas said.

Another 20-acre tract along San Pasqual Road will undergo the costly planting in a year or so, Thomas said.

The wine from the new Chardonnay vines will be fermented and aged in French oak casks to become a “flagship” wine for the San Pasqual winery. Premium wines grown and bottled locally now bring $9 to $10 a bottle, Braun said. One Thomas Jaeger wine last year was named a gold-medal winner at a statewide competition.

Besides the new 20-acre planting, Thomas Jaeger has 40 acres of producing vines in San Pasqual and another 60- to 75-acre vineyard under lease near Fallbrook. The new planting will also include a test plot of about an acre of Nebiollo, orange muscat, Syrah and muscat Hamburg varieties.

Thomas said that San Diego needed the expertise that Napa vintners could bring to the operation to achieve a name for local wines. Initially, the Thomas Jaeger wines will be marketed only in the San Diego area, he said.

Thomas’ and Jaeger’s sons, Jack Jaeger and Jim Thomas, will operate the winery at 13455 San Pasqual Road, eventually increasing production to 35,000 cases a year.

The winery is now producing about 10,000 cases of wine yearly, which makes it a very small operation in comparison with a giant of the industry such as E.J. Gallo Winery, which can produce 250,000 cases a day.

“We will never be big, but we will continue to be a premium wine producer,” Thomas said.

Gasper Ferrara, an Escondido vintner, applauded the Thomas Jaeger move to the Escondido area.

“This is the best growing area in the state,” Ferrara said, praising the inland North County valley’s climate and soils.

Ferrara, his father, George, and his uncle, Jerry Ferrara, have been growing grapes and making wine in the Escondido area since 1932. The Ferrara Winery in southwest Escondido, just a few miles from the Thomas Jaeger Winery, pressed 170 tons of grapes last year but only raised 3 acres of grapes at the winery.

Ferrara explained that he had once leased acreage for vineyards “all over this area” but lost his leases in 1965 when the landowner sold out to developers.

“Some of it (his former vineyards) is a shopping center; some is in condominiums, and the rest is residential,” Ferrara said.

He now buys grapes locally, in Valley Center and elsewhere, for his winery production.

Jaeger “made a smart move” to branch out from his Northern California operations to San Diego, Ferrara said, “because it is a great place to grow grapes. It’s not just good. It’s perfect.”