Colleges, High Schools Uncork Wine Education

It is a gorgeous classroom. Rolling hills as far as the eye can see. Enormous oaks made small by the wide blue sky. An airborne hawk tracing hundreds of rows of grapevines stitched into the soil.

Those are the perks of signing up for a hands-on wine education class, a fast-growing area of study at Central Coast colleges and even some California high schools.

Gone are the days of sip-and-spit wine tastings. Students now put on gloves and galoshes and head out to the vineyards to dig, plant and prune the vines themselves. They pick and crush the grapes they grow and turn them into wine.

“I wanted to learn more about wine,” said Sharon Christiansen, a student at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria. “Then, when we went out in the vineyards, I just loved it. It’s fascinating and it’s great to be outdoors. This would be a great way of life.”

She is one of more than 700 students who have signed up for the community college’s oenology and viticulture program since its 1996 start in this agricultural town in Santa Barbara County. About half of those students earn an associate’s degree from the college or transfer to a four-year program; the rest take classes simply for the experience.

A growing interest in wine has led schools throughout the state to create or expand oenology and viticulture programs to make room for thousands of eager students. With California wine sales at well over $5 billion a year, budding oenologists and vineyard managers could find themselves in demand.

California wineries are so fired up about the programs that they are donating grapes, vines and winemaking facilities to help nurture a well-educated work force.

“It’s a natural partnership. This is a fast-growing industry that needs skilled workers,” said Merilark Padgett-Johnson, full-time oenology and viticulture instructor at Hancock.

Donations from the wine industry include a ton of grapes for student winemaking from Meridian Vineyards, winemaking facilities provided by Central Coast Wine Services in Santa Maria, and equipment from the Santa Barbara County Vintners Assn. Kendall-Jackson, one of the big producers in Sonoma County, has donated space in Central Coast vineyards for Hancock’s students.

For many, the first few hours in the vineyard are a revelation.

“We get people who come here because they like wine, or they are interested in wine,” Padgett- Johnson said. “Then they get out in the vineyards and plant and prune and think about technique, and suddenly they discover a passion for it.”

That passion can begin even before college.

About 25 students at Santa Rosa High School in Sonoma County are enrolled in the school’s 18-month-old viticulture program, one of only four or five at that level throughout the state. Unlike college classes, in which students over the age of 21 may make and handle wine, the high schoolers concentrate on the basics of growing grapes.

The Santa Rosa students mix classroom study with work in a seven-acre vineyard, the first student farm in the history of the school’s 75-year-old agriculture program. Some are surprised by the array of expertise needed to put a bottle of wine on the dinner table. From soil science, mapping, water studies, irrigation and chemistry to botany, horticulture, marketing, advertising, public relations and zoning, students are exposed to a broad range of professions.

Although the vineyard sits on school-owned land, much of the equipment and expertise needed to run it come from the community.

“One of our local newspapers wrote about our plans for a vineyard, and the school got a call from Kendall-Jackson, offering to help us,” said Leroy Wallace, an agriculture instructor at the school. “They gave us the expertise of their people, like the soil scientists who helped do the tests on the land, and they supplied things like the vines, which in itself was a $20,000 donation.”

Some parents asked whether teaching students how to make an alcoholic beverage was appropriate, but school officials liken it to learning auto shop years before being eligible to drive.

“You can’t move around the county without moving through the vineyards,” Wallace said. “This program is a way of, as our area becomes more and more urban, keeping the ag program current. You can make a living in the vineyards.”

The partnership is good news for the vintners as well.

“This is actually a hidden industry,” said Julie Collins, project manager for Kendall-Jackson, which farms more than 11,000 acres of grapes in the state. “All people see are these rows and rows of vines. So this puts a face on the company. It’s a way to physically get out and help in the community and give the community a chance to learn about our farming practices.”

But Ryan Weber of Santa Maria is more concerned with just plain practice.

The 24-year-old firefighter- turned-student squatted near a dormant vine, counted nodes, then clipped the gray stalk at an angle. He nodded.

“I want to learn enough to make a living at this,” he said, looking down at his work, then around at the soft gray hills. “To me, this is more than a job; this is a lifestyle. This would be a great way to live.”