New Dawn for Temecula Vintners

Little did Ray Falkner know after buying a Temecula winery last summer that he would be seen as one of the living dead. It’s happened time and again, from Los Angeles to Monterey, as Falkner shows off his wares at wine shows.

“People say, ‘Wow, you’re from Temecula,’ ” said Falkner, who owns Falkner Winery with his wife, Loretta. “They say, ‘I thought you guys were out for the count.’ ”

They almost were--but Temecula is back, and here to stay, its vintners insist.

In 1997, grasshopper look-alikes known as glassy-winged sharpshooters moved into the region, infecting the plucky cluster of vineyards with a bacterial infection known as Pierce’s disease, which hampers the ability of plants to absorb water. The disease has no cure.

Last year may have been the darkest yet. Vintners were forced to pull out sickly vines, some of them a quarter-century old. Some grape growers went to Riverside County tax officials, hat in hand, to make the case that their farms were no longer worth what they once were. The wine industry was digging Temecula’s grave, writing it off as a bug-infested relic, a fun experiment while it lasted.

Suddenly, though, a cautious optimism has permeated Temecula’s vineyards, just as the wine region, nestled in the hills of southern Riverside County, is preparing for its annual harvest.

Vintners say they are preparing for a robust harvest. Even with the loss of some grapes, Temecula is producing more specialized niche wines--such as Hart Winery’s Temprenillo, modeled after the full-bodied reds of central Spain--to accompany the chardonnays that dominate the region. There is a new warehouse at one winery, a new bottling line at another.

And most important, farmers, scientists and politicians believe they have contained--though not eradicated--the threat of the sharpshooter.

“I don’t think anybody thinks we’re out of the woods,” said Joe Hart, owner and winemaker at Hart Winery and president of the Temecula Valley Winegrowers Assn. “But I think we’ve bounced back pretty well. Maybe it’s an optimistic viewpoint, but I think nature has a way of balancing things out over time.”

That may be, but it only raises another important point for the state’s $33-billion wine industry.

While Temecula believes it has gotten a handle on the sharpshooter, the bug continues to march northward. Last week, two sharpshooters were trapped in San Jose, and an egg mass was found nearby, putting the critter on the doorstep of Northern California’s Napa and Sonoma regions.

What’s more, some wine insiders fear that Northern California’s aversion to pesticides could hamper the campaign to kill off the sharpshooter if the bug gains a foothold there.

For now, though, the sharpshooter is not an agricultural threat in Northern California. And until it is, California’s wine industry would prefer to focus on the southern end of the state, where all-out war on the sharpshooter has produced some encouraging results.

Agricultural experts say parasitic wasps imported to feast on sharpshooter eggs are showing great promise, and thousands of the wasps are released each week.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have helped develop several other methods of containing the sharpshooter, such as coating grape vines with a powdery white clay mined in Georgia.

Sharpshooters that land on the treated vines find themselves covered in the clay. That appears to irritate them, disrupt their mating and restrict their ability to pass on Pierce’s disease, said Ben Drake, president of Drake Enterprises, a Temecula farm-management company hired by area grape growers to fight the sharpshooter.

Scientists have launched 53 research projects targeting the sharpshooter, Drake said, and have learned valuable information about the bug, allowing them to better track it and predict its next move. Others are even attempting to alter crops to make them immune to Pierce’s disease and render the sharpshooters harmless--though that ultimate solution is considered years down the road.

As much as 30% of Temecula’s vines have been destroyed since the sharpshooter moved in, Drake said. But Temecula vintners now see it not as a harbinger of doom, but as a persistent pest.

Outside Temecula, wine experts say their excitement is more tempered. As Karen Ross, president of the California Assn. of Winegrape Growers, put it: “You can’t be a farmer unless you are optimistic.”

But even those outside the Temecula region agree that there is reason for hope.

“There is no question that this insect is a very serious threat, not only to the state’s wine grape industry, but to the state’s economy and environment,” said Bob Krauter, spokesman for the California Farm Bureau.

“But things have happened very quickly, and there’s been a lot of progress. There’s been kind of a full-court press on against this insect and the disease it causes. They have been battling the bug down there, and, I think, battling it quite successfully.”

One of the tools that has proved most successful, however, is pesticide use. And that has bug experts anxious as the sharpshooter trudges north.

Large-scale applications of insecticides aren’t taken lightly in Northern California, and protesters are already abuzz in some areas, even before the sharpshooters arrive en masse.

It’s not just a cultural difference between Riverside County and Northern California--the use of pesticides to kill sharpshooters is also a business threat.

Many smaller grape growers, particularly in the Napa and Sonoma regions, have been quite successful selling organic grapes--those grown and harvested without the use of synthetic pesticides.

One application of chemical spray could “set all of that progress back,” Ross said.

But Temecula growers aren’t sure it’s possible to hold back the sharpshooter without using chemical pesticides.

“If I was in Napa, and particularly Sonoma, I would be very, very concerned because of their strong position against sprays,” said Falkner, the Temecula vintner. “It is clear that before we sprayed, the adult population [of sharpshooters] expanded as fast as mosquitoes and fruit flies. They can go from 100 to 100,000 in a very short period of time.”

Agricultural experts, however, say it’s still not certain the sharpshooter will even become entrenched in the farms of Northern California’s wine regions. And they believe they have learned enough from Temecula’s battle against the bug that they can contain it without having to resort to pesticides.

“I think it’s part of our future one way or another,” Ross said. “But I believe we will learn how to manage it.”

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Targets for a Sharpshooter

Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter

A threat to the state’s $30-billion wine and grape industry, as well as oleander plants.

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Sources: California Dept. of Food & Agriculture, California’s Rogers Study Group report, 1998