A sleuth in the vineyard

Napa

Carole Meredith made a name for herself in the world of wine as a practitioner of scientific exactitude, an internationally recognized grape sleuth who used DNA technology to solve the century-old riddle of Zinfandel’s origins.

So, you would think when it came to planting her own small vineyard she would have chemically analyzed the soil, compiled weather logs and fussed over which grape varieties best suited the site.

“We didn’t do any of those things,” she says with a shrug. “We planted what we love, and we love Syrah. We just took a flying leap.”

The four-acre Lagier-Meredith Vineyard that she and her winemaker husband, Steve Lagier, planted in 1994 now produces 500 cases a year of a hefty and distinctive wine that sells for $50 a bottle.

The vineyard falls away dramatically from their rustic wooden house 1,300 feet up Mount Veeder, toward a stunning vista of the southern Napa Valley. It is an apt symbol of Meredith’s personal transformation. Newly retired from the faculty of UC Davis, the Vatican of wine science, she is now caught up principally in the subjective and emotional aspects of wine.

During a recent afternoon on the deck above her vineyard, as bright mountaintop light strove to warm the chill air, she reflected on her metamorphosis and on the limits of science in explaining art.

“At Davis, we always say we don’t teach people to make wine, we teach them the science behind it, and that the artistry has to come from them,” she says. “It was not until Steve and I planted this vineyard and started making wine that I felt the passion our students feel. I think I may be the only faculty member who’s felt the thrill. It’s very magical.”

Meredith, 55, is a sturdy, energetic woman with short, gray hair. She took emerita status from the university’s department of viticulture and oenology on Jan. 11, after 22 years on the faculty.

Her principal contribution as a researcher was the definitive identification of grapevines, which had eluded and long bedeviled winegrowers around the world. Although she was not the first to employ DNA analysis to that end, her lab at UC Davis became the best known for doing so. It was a major force in establishing the technology as a tool for growers, nurseries and wineries in virtually all winegrowing countries.

Meredith’s noteworthy “cases,” beginning in the early 1990s, included determining that the Gamay grown by California producers was actually Pinot Noir and the obscure French variety called Valdiguie (French Beaujolais producers, who make wine from genuine Gamay, had sued over the matter).

She also identified the Pinot Blanc being grown by some California producers -- dismayed that their wines did not exhibit the soft richness that characterizes the variety -- as Melon de Bourgogne, which in France makes light, racy Muscadet.

Three years ago, she confirmed that the Roussanne more than a dozen California producers were growing and vinting was actually Viognier. Both are white-wine grapes from France’s Rhone Valley, but make very different wines. The imbroglio produced a $7-million lawsuit filed by Caymus Vineyards against Sonoma Grapevines, the state’s largest nursery, which had supplied many of the misidentified vines.

Meredith and her lab achieved the widest recognition for their pioneering work tracing the origins and parentage of grape varieties. It had long been assumed that, given the anarchic proliferation of grapes across regional boundaries over millenniums, the origins of the classic wine grapes were lost in antiquity forever.

In 1996, a Meredith doctoral student named John Bowers was building a computer database of grape varieties’ DNA profiles. While on the lookout for interesting correlations among them, he noticed that the profile of Cabernet Sauvignon was consistent with that grape’s being the offspring of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc. At some point in the remote past, the latter two varieties must have naturally cross-pollinated to produce what became the world’s most celebrated wine grape.

“It was a eureka moment,” Meredith recalls. “He called me at home when I was asleep. We realized maybe we could do something with this. John’s discovery was serendipitous, but now we decided we should go looking for this purposely.”

They focused first on the wine grapes of northeastern France, choosing 300 varieties. Bowers spent a month at the French national grapevine collection in Montpelier gathering specimens, then DNA-profiled each and entered the profiles in a database. Finally, he wrote a program that compared the thousands of possible parental combinations.

Soon they identified the parents of Chardonnay -- Pinot and an ancient French grape called Gouais Blanc. Chardonnay had been thought to have come from Lebanon.

The researchers looked, too, into the mystery of the grape called Petite Sirah in California. It was clear it wasn’t Syrah. Meredith’s DNA tests confirmed others’ suspicion that it was the French grape Durif -- at least, 85% of it was. Some of it, however, turned out to be a French variety called Peloursin.

Meredith and her lab also determined the parents of Syrah -- the French varieties Durez and Mondeuse Blanche, putting the lie to a long-standing theory that Syrah (known as Shiraz in Australia and elsewhere) originated in Persia, modern-day Iran, where there is a city named Shiraz.

This linking of wine grapes with history and culture served to bring Meredith’s work to the attention of the lay public. The apex of popular recognition came when her lab successfully traced the origins of Zinfandel to a disappearing Croatian variety called Crljenak. The discovery made Meredith something of a celebrity in Croatia, and has been a tonic to that country’s old, impoverished wine industry as it struggles to regain its footing. “It’s been wonderful to be able to draw people’s attention to this great old wine culture that’s existed as long as those in Western Europe,” she says.

Now Meredith is finished with sleuthing and is weaning herself from the academic life in general. “It’s one part intellectual thrill to nine parts bureaucratic drudgery,” she says. “I’m looking forward to spending more time in the vineyard and running our little wine business a little better.”

Meredith and Lagier do all their planting, vine-tending and winemaking themselves. Only at harvest do they recruit other hands. The couple is contemplating expanding the vineyard, she says, but only a little, “because we don’t want to have more acres than we can farm ourselves.” She thinks they might plant one more acre in vines, and cap wine production at about 800 cases a year.

The idea now, she says, is to be subsumed into the subculture of small Napa winegrowers, “people who want to live in a rural environment, who don’t care about making a lot of money and are very independent. People who don’t play the game.”