9UNP1226SD_Amaya Atucha

- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Night at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here atthe U.W. Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for U.W. Extension and Cooperative Extension and on behalf of those folks, and other co-organizers, the Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association and the U.W. Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Amaya Atucha, she was born in Chile, which, I just found out, is east of Wisconsin. And she was born in a place called Vina Del Mar, grapevine of the sea, which is pretty remarkable. She went to school at the Catholic University of Valparaiso and studied Horticulture. Then she got her PhD in Cornell and then she became an assistant professor at Colorado State University, but not at the Fort Collins Campus, she was working on the Western Slope Experiment Station out in Grand Junction, Colorado. So she's worked by the ocean, she's worked on the high plateaus and now she's here, working at 800 feet of altitude. She gets to talk to us about wine grapes in Wisconsin. 

Please join me in welcoming Amaya Atucha to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. 
[ Applause ]

- Thank you, Tom. Wine grapes in Wisconsin, I was like, what, when they told me. In Wisconsin? That was my reaction when I heard about this, when I interviewed for this job here. I was like how can they grow grapes for wine in Wisconsin? Coming from Chile, it was quite a shock. I knew something about cold hardy grapes, studying at Cornell, but I didn't know that was all the way up here in Wisconsin. So when I started thinking about this talk, I said "Hmm, how about I put together a history of how did we end up growing grapes for wine here in Wisconsin." 

And it was a bit of a journey to learn everything we'll cover during this hour. Hopefully thousands and thousands of years of history of grape vines all condensed to try to answer how come we're growing grapes for wine here in Wisconsin. So the first thing is I want to start showing this map here, which actually shows the number of days here in Wisconsin of when the temperature doesn't drop below 32 Fahrenheit. So you can see really, up here in the top part of the state, that there's only around 100 days of the entire year where the temperature, where there's a 50 percent probability that the temperature won't drop below 32 Fahrenheit. So basically that the grape vines are not going to freeze. So it's very challenging to grow grapes here. And this has been a lot of science and a lot of discoveries and accidents that have taken us through this journey to be able to have Wisconsin wine. So I wanted to start with a little bit of the history. So grapes were one of the earliest fruit species to be domesticated. It's the most economically important food crop in the world. 

So, I didn't know that. So, a little bit of the taxonomy of grapes. So the family grapes is in the Vitaceae family, which actually has around 17 genre, but only in two of them we have all of the cultivated grapes. And those are the genus Vitis and the genus Muscadinia. And in the genus Muscadinia we find Vitis Rotundifolia. Some of you might be familiar with Muscadine grapes that are in the South. They grow in the South because actually they're not cold hardy. But then we have the genus Vitis, which, there's two groups in them. The American group, which has all of these listed there, the species, those that are listed there are not all of them, are just the ones that are important for grape production and have helped play a role in the breeding of the varieties that we use, especially here in Wisconsin. And then the Eurasian group, you can see Vitis Vinifera, which is actually the species where we have all of the grapes we're more familiar with in terms of wine. 

That's where your Cabernet Sauvignon, your Chardonnay, your Merlot come from, from the Vitis Vinifera. And it's actually Vitis Vinifera I have a map here I want to show you, which where are these species native from? So you can see on your left side of the United States, you can see all of the American groups of Vitis that I was previously showing you. And I want to talk a little bit about each one of them and their characteristics.

So depending on the taxonomies, there are different ways of classifying them. And some of them, some taxonomies, put them all into 8 species, but some of them classified up to 34 different species. So it depends on where you read, the different sources you're going to find. I'm just going to concentrate in the ones that are actually relevant to grape breeding for table grapes and for wine grapes. So Vitis Riparia, there's a picture of it, it actually extends from Canada to Texas and from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Rocky Mountains. It's known as the bank grape, usually you can find it around a riverbank. 

It's very cold hardy. You can imagine if it's in Canada, it resists very cold winters, the cold winters of Wisconsin. And it's tolerant to an aphid, an insect, that as I move on through the history of grapes you can see that it causes a lot of problems in Europe. And it's also resistant to a number of fungal diseases that we have here in this area, which are very problematic for other types of grapes to grow. But because Vitis Riparia is native to this area, it can survive all of these pests and diseases. So the next one that I want to talk about is Vitis Berlandieri. You can see here it's native from central Texas and Eastern Mexico. If a species that grows very well on very basic soils, soils that have very high PH, which for some species can be a problem, sometimes we want to grow some fruit crops on soils that are not the best soils for them, they have different PH and that has an implication on the availability of nutrients, so some plants don't like to grow on soils that have very high PH or very low PH. In this case this Vitis is very important because it has the characteristics that allows it to grow on soils that have very high PH, which we've used to incorporate into breeding programs so that we can come up with new varieties that are able to grow in these types of soils that before, because we didn't have this genetic information coming from these specific species, we can now grow those grapes there. But one of the problems I have is that it's very difficult to propagate, so we cannot reproduce and propagate this species easily.

Okay, so, I want to try to, back.

So, okay, we have a little bit of some problems so I'm going to go back like this. The next one is Vitis Rupestri, which extends from Texas to Tennessee. This species is almost extinct. It doesn't exist anymore. It's very difficult to find. It's one of those species that is disappearing. And it's known as the rug grape, because it likes to grow in creek beds. It's very tolerant to some of these native pests here in North America and it's also resistant to some of the diseases that we have, some fungal diseases that are very, that affect very badly some of the European species. Vitis, I'm not, try to go back here. 

There we go. And then we have Vitis Labrusca, which is, since it's native from Georgia to southeastern Canada, with Indiana as the western limit. It's a very vigorous vine, and it's called, it's known as the Northern Fox Grape. It's very cold hardy. It resists the cold, very low temperatures. And Vitis Labrusca has a very distinctive taste. It's the taste of the Concord Grape that we're all familiar with. So the Concord Grape has genetic information from Vitis Labrusca. And so it has that foxy taste that is, what we associate with the taste of grapes, especially here in North America. Which, funny story, when I came here, I, somebody gave me some grape juice. 

I was like, wow, this just taste funny, but I was like okay. There's something strange about it. I said, it's probably a chemical. It just tasted very chemical, like this foxy taste. And so then, afterwards they took me to a vineyard where there was Concord grapes and they gave me some of the grapes to taste, and I was like wow, it tastes just like the juice. And it's true. It has that very strange taste. And for me, coming from Chile, never having these grapes because, as you can see, all of them are native from North America, none of them are in South America. And I was like wow, this is very strange. So that always stayed with me how actually the juice that I blamed to taste very chemical was actually the real taste of the grapes. 

So I will always remember Concord and Vitis Labrusca because of that. And then the next Vitis species that has play an important role in breeding for this new varieties that we grow here in Wisconsin is Vitis Aestivalis, which is also native from eastern North America. It grows in very dry land, so in very dry uplands and forests. It's very cold hardy, as some of the other ones I've talked about. It's also drought tolerant, which makes it a really tough vine, excellent, it withstands cold, it withstands drought. And it also tolerates a very wet and humid summer, like the summers here in Wisconsin. And it's known as the summer grape. But one of the problems it has, it's very difficult to propagate. And the last species that I want to talk about is Vitis Vinifera. So I just talked about how Vitis Vinifera is the species where all of our classic grape vine varieties are part of, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, all of them are part of Vitis Vinifera. 

And actually it's Vitis Vinifera, it's native from western Asia and Europe, it's very tolerant to this high PH soil and to drought as well, very similar as some of the species that I was showing before, but it's very susceptible to all these fungal diseases that we have here in North America, and it's also susceptible to some of the pests, especially phylloxera, which is an aphid that affects leaves and roots of vines. So what are the main difference between the American Vitis species and the European Vitis species? Well, the European species are very, they produce a lot of fruit, they don't have any problems producing fruit. They have great quality of fruit, as well, which differs from the American species, which is actually they yield, very poor and variable. It's hard to get some of these species to have big clusters with a lot of berries, big berries, it's very irregular and it's very weather dependent. It's not as consistent and the European species. Also the quality of the fruit is not as good. We talked about that foxy taste, that very characteristic taste that some of these American species have. The European species are very easy to propagate. You can get some cuttings, some canes of a vine and you can just stick them in the soil, or when they're growing you can put some of this vine in the soil and they will produce roots easily. 

You can take them out and then you have a new plant. That's not the case with the American varieties. They are much harder to propagate. Also, the European species is resistant to the high PH soil, which is not the case with the American species. Some of them, as I showed before, do perform well, but the majority of them don't like these high PH soils, which is the type of soil that we find in regions like France, where we have a lot of grapes. Also the European species, as I said before, is not very, it's not tolerant of the phylloxera, which is this insect, this aphid that affects the roots and the leaves. And it's highly affected by some of the fungal diseases. But has a perfect flower. What does that mean? It has a flower that has feminine organs and the masculine organs. 

So it's a flower that's a hermaphrodite, so it's able to pollinate itself, so it doesn't need pollen from other source to be able to produce fruit, which is not the case of the American species. Actually the American species, some plants have only pistillate flowers and some plants have only staminate flowers. So they need cross pollination. They need pollinators to move this pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers so they can produce fruit. So how did one single grape species, which is Vitis Vinifera, become the producer of 99 percent of the world's wine? Vitis Vinifera produces 99 percent of all of the wine in the world. How come? We have so many American species. I've talked only about 5 of them and there are many, many more. And it's only Vitis Vinifera, the one that produces all the wine. 

The reason why is because Vitis Vinifera was domesticated. So it was selected by humans, not by nature, that humans selected certain traits of this Vitis Vinifera, and the most important one, as you can see here is the flowers. Originally Vitis Vinifera had flowers that were feminine and masculine flowers separately. But many, many, many years ago humans started selecting for the ones that actually had flowers with both sex. So that's the reason why Vitis Vinifera became so important and not the other species. That's why Vitis Vinifera actually produces most of the wine. So what I want to go through now is a little bit about the history of where did this start and where Vitis Vinifera was selected and through the history of what are we doing here in Wisconsin and where are these varieties that we're growing here for wine are coming from. So most researchers believe actually that wine making was evolved from this area here in southern Caucasia, which in the present day, as you can see here, is that area between Turkey, northern Iraq and Azerbaijan and Georgia. This is the area where the grapes were selected, this Vitis Vinifera was domesticated. You can see here in red in this map all those different color on the coast is actually where wild Vitis Vinifera grapes were growing, but it was around this area where human started selecting for this species that actually had these perfect flowers.

And so what is interesting is that you can see, in this map here, you can see some archaeological evidence of the first area where, the places where wine has been found, where archaeological evidence of wine has been found and still all in this same area around here where these circles around here. And you can see here, also, again, where all these wild grapes now a days is distributed. What is interesting is actually people in this area were making wine, the questions is why Native Americans were not making wine of the grapes they had here in North America? So they were making alcoholic drinks and beverages out of other plant material, but not wine. And I think there is still no real answer of why that happened. There's actually no archaeological evidence of Native Americans making wine out of the Native American grape vines.

So what I want to show here is how the grape was taken from the place of origin and distributed everywhere. So on the number ones, you can see the origins around Caucasia and Mesopotamia, and you can see around 6,000 B.C., it was cultivated by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians and it was taken to Egypt from this region, it was taken to Egypt and started being cultivated. Then from there, around 2,000 B.C., it went all the way to Greece and then from there around 1,000 B.C., this is very fast, going through history very fast, there were actually, it was taken to Italy on the Roman Empire, Sicily and Northern Africa. And then in the next 500 years it was taken to Spain, Portugal, the South of France and it was actually the Romans who spread it all the way to Northern Europe to Britain and to Germany. 

And here are some nice pictures that I found of some archaeological evidence of the Roman Empire where they were actually perfecting the art of growing grapes and making wine and how they were importing a lot of their wine in this amphoras that you can see here from all their colonies that they had in the Mediterranean. So they had wine growing in the South of Spain, Northern Africa, and from all of those colonies that they were importing wine that they were producing in this area for the Empire. And so you can see this very beautiful mosaic here of the Greek God of Wine, Dionysus in a mosaic in Pompeii and also this very old barrel here that the Romans used to transport wine. So with the fall of the Roman Empire, what happened is that grape cultivation and wine making was taken over by the church and it was through the monasteries, the monks and the church who actually started growing wine, producing wine, not only for their religious purpose, but it ended up being part of, you know, the social life. People would drink wine and you had all this significance of drinking the blood of God, of Jesus. And they were the ones that actually started doing the first techniques of how to grow them, when to grow them, how to propagate it. They started producing these different training systems, the trellises so there's a lot of the viticulture, the early viticulture techniques that would take actually off of the monks that started all this techniques and they documented it.

So after the middle ages, with the discovery of the new world, Vitis Vinifera, the Conquistadors wanted to have wine so they brought Vitis Vinifera, they brought the grapes with them to the new colonies so that they could start producing wine here. And so what you can see here is how very early on that Conquistadors brought the grapes to Latin America. You can see in Mexico in 1520, in Peru and Chile between 1530 and 1540, Argentina a little bit after that, and the eastern and southern ridges of the United States very early on. 

But look at this, California, I just wanted to show how late actually the first vineyards were established in California. Very, very, very late compared to the rest of Latin America. And as I said before, what is interesting is that even though there are Native America grapes species, the indigenous people were not producing any wine from them. They were actually producing other variants from other fruits or cereals, but not from wine. So when the Conquistadors arrived, the first things that they noticed, and they were very struck by it, was the abundance of vines. There were so many types of grapes everywhere. They were growing wild everywhere, and actually after only two years of Columbus' discovery of the new world, they found that there were grapes even growing in the Caribbean Islands. And the pilgrims establishing New England found a lot of this Vitis Labrusca that I talk about is the one that has this very foxy taste and where Concord grapes come from. They were growing everywhere. One of the Conquistadors and explorers, Giovanni de Verrazzano reported that in actually North Carolina there were a lot, a lot of grapes growing. 

So they found it everywhere. Now the Conquistadors were like why were the indigenous people not making any wine out of them? Well, what they wanted was wine, so they tried to make wine and grow grapes any way they could. So there are many stories of where actually the first wines were made and whether it was from the Vitis Vinifera that they brought from Europe, whether it was from the native grapes here. But there's some record that in 1565 actually in Florida, the Huguenots who were Protestants that fled from France, made the first wine. We don't know whether it was from the grapes that they brought here and the vineyards that they established or they were from the native grapes. The Spaniards, also in South Carolina where there were all these vines also tried to establish vineyards there and make wine, not very successfully. Afterwards in the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, there were many, many, many attempts at trying to grow grapes and make wines. And around 1620 viticulture was made mandatory in Virginia. Why? 

You can see here, I put this because I thought it was very interesting. The king said everybody has to grow grapes. We need to make wine. Why? Because England was getting all the wine from where? From France, from Spain, from Italy, which they were always battling. This was iconic trade situation. They didn't want to depend anymore from Spain or from France to get their wine. They were like what if the Spanish arrived here first and they were able to establish all these vineyards in Chile, in Peru, in Argentina, in Mexico. Why can we not have our own wine? 

Why is these colonies are not producing enough wine? And so it was made a law, actually, that they had to plant vines and try to produce wine. Poor settlers, they had a really hard time. There was failure over and over and over again. In Virginia in the 1630's, they tried. They failed completely. Then there's some history about the Georgia experiment a century afterwards. Again, failing. In South Carolina, in Louisiana, everywhere, there was something about the climate, the soil, the disease, the insects, there was something that didn't allow either the native grapes to produce the quality of wine or the amount of fruit that they needed and the Vitis Vinifera they were bringing from Europe was actually not establishing. The plants were dying. 

They grew for a couple of years and everybody was like yeah, finally, we're going to have a vineyard, we're going to have wine, and then they collapsed. And it was over and over and over again. And the grapes from the native vines did not make really good wine. So they didn't like it, so they really wanted to grow the vinifera. So the question is why, if there were other European fruits like apples, pears, they grew, they grew fine. They have no problems. Why the vinifera grapes were not, they were not able to establish a vineyard and make it produce and yield enough grapes to make a wine? The reason is because the Native American vines. What happens is that they're so closely related that the native grapes that were here were growing with all these insects, all these fungal diseases, but they didn't care, they had evolved with them, they were able to tolerate them. But these grapes that came from Europe that were very closely related from the same family from the grapes that were native from North America, they were not used to them. 

They did not evolve with those pests. So they got all these terrible pests, powder mildew, downy mildew, black rot, so it was one after the other and that was the reason why they were not able to succeed, because there were so many pests, so many disease that did not affect the native ones, but they did affect the Vitis Vinifera, so they were incredibly frustrated. So what happened after that is that they found a grape that actually worked. It was growing, didn't have any problems, produced beautiful fruit and it was called the Alexander grape, though it has many different names. But what happened is that this grape is the natural hybrid. So from all these vineyards with Vinifera they started establishing, at some point some of the pollen from the Vitis Vinifera fertilized, pollinated some of the native grapes and produced grapes and somebody ate them and there were seeds and those seeds were spread and they grew and it was a hybrid between the vinifera and some of the natives. In this case we don't know, but they think it was the Labrusca, which is the one that Concord came from. And so this was this natural hybrid by accident and somebody found it in these old vineyards that had been established so many years ago, but they were abandoned because the plants died. And so they found these and this was around the 1740s in Philadelphia. In the city was an old vineyard that was planted almost a century before and they found this and this variety, the Alexander grape, was actually the first successful story of growing grapes in North America, especially in the East Coast. 

And the reason why they figure out it was a hybrid and it was not a native is because it had the perfect flowers. And those genes of perfect flowers and that trait comes from the Vitis Vinifera and not the native American species. So then they started finding a lot of new hybrids, all of these new varieties. They started finding all of these new varieties that were hybrids and they were producing really well and the fruit, the plants were doing well, they didn't have any problems with the disease, the fruit was relatively good. And so they started establishing all of these vineyards from this species that they had found from this new varieties that they had found. And one of it is the Catawba, which is a hybrid that they selected because it made, actually, very decent wine. And so they started making wine out of these. And it was actually Nicholas Longworth from Cincinnati who established the first successful vineyard in Cincinnati, Ohio. And he planted this variety that I showed here before, the Catawba, sorry for my English, it's not perfect, if you don't understand you can read it there, but he was the first one, actually, to start this. And he made sparkling wine and they took it to Europe and people actually liked it. 

And so he actually had the first very successful vineyard in Cincinnati, Ohio. And so here there's a catalog of all of these varieties that they started finding and they started selling and people started establishing all of these vineyards. And so the solution to the problem was actually not to try to make the Vinifera grow, but to find a grape that would survive, that would yield enough and that would make wine decent enough that they could sell and that people could drink and that was it. That's what they needed to do instead of trying to grow Vinifera over and over and over again. And so as more and more of these hybrids started appearing, people started thinking, they started thinking about the possibility of this, how to try to make new hybrids? So there's where the Concord grape appeared. Ephraim Bull from Concord, who is in this picture here with the original concord grape, what he did is he tested millions of seedlings, there were all these grapes, he put all the seeds, he planted all the seeds, he grew all these vines and the ones that survived the winter, the ones that started producing grapes, he started selecting them, he started selecting which ones were the best and from there he actually got the concord grape, which is now the most famous American species and one of the most famous and one of the grapes that is produced the most here in the eastern part of North America. What about Wisconsin? When was the first vineyard planted here in Wisconsin? So the first vineyard planted in Wisconsin was around 1846. 

But this Hungarian man called Agoston Haraszthy, I probably butchered that, but I'm sorry, and he, which is very funny, he's known as the father of California viticulture. Why? Because he established a vineyard here. He did a number of things, very interesting, his life. If you have time and you like about history, try and find some history. He did a lot of things. He established a town. He had a lot of businesses. But one of the most important things is he planted this vineyard and he planted the vineyard, he stayed here a couple of years and then he left in a 1849 to go to California and he actually established there this very famous vineyard, the Buena Vista Vineyard in Seminole, California and he became a very famous viticulturist and wine producer, and so as I said, he's known as the father of California viticulture. But the first vineyard he established was in Sauk City and the variety that he planted was thought to be Marechal Foch, which is one of these hybrids between the Vitis Vinifera from Europe and the native species here in North America. 

And that vineyard, after a long, long, long history is actually Wollersheim Winery here in Wisconsin, which is the biggest winery that we have here in the state. So it's a long history, I'm not going to explain much of the details, but if you want to know about its history, just look it up. It's very interesting. So what happened after all these hybrids started appearing is that people also brought some of this material back to Europe. And so all the botanists wanted to take some of these new grapes and take them to Europe and study them and look at them and put them in their collections. But with that they brought all these diseases and the pests that were here and they were not in Europe. One of them is the phylloxera. The phylloxera is, as I said, is an aphid that is native from North American and you can see here it affects the roots of the vines, the vines die and it also affects the leaves. But the native species, they didn't have any problem. They were able to tolerate and so they never had any problem. 

They didn't die here in North America, but as soon as these materials started going to Europe and they imported these pests, the vineyards started collapsing. And in fact almost 90 percent of the vineyards collapsed and died in Europe, especially in France. And the first evidence of this infestation was in 1863 in the South of France. And you can see from this map here how it spread really fast here from the South all the way up here. It was terrible. It's terrible. And this lasted for 20 years, for a very long time. They were trying to figure out what it was, whether this aphid that they found was the cause of the disease or was it a result of something else happening. There was all this time and all this money invested. The government, imagine that France had exported all it's wine, the production of wine went all the way down to almost 20 percent of what they used to produce. 

People were devastated. They didn't know what to do. The vineyards kept dying and dying and dying and dying. So the same way, because of the native American grapes, the Vitis Vinifera did not grow, died here in America, it was the American vines who saved the European vines in Europe. And this is actually a monument that they have in the South of France to a scientist called Jules Planchon, who was part of a team of scientists trying to figure out what was the problem. And so there were scientists in Europe and scientists here in North America looking at what was the problem and they figured out that it was this aphid. And after many years of research and research and research, they came up with a solution. And the solution was to graft the Vitis Vinifera on North American root stocks. So what they did is that they got this American species and the Vitis Vinifera and they did this graft in which the top part of a plant is made out of Vitis Vinifera, so all of the varieties they have, the Cabernet Sauvignon, the Merlot, the Pinot Noir, all of them, but the root system is made out of the American species, which were resistant to these pests. And so that's one of the ways that they saved and that they were able to replant all of these vineyards and start producing wine again. 

But some of the other things that happened as they were trying to look for solutions is that they came up with these hybrids. They said, okay, why don't we try to find a way to breed for this root stock, which is the below ground part of the plant, the root system of the plant, so that actually it is able to overcome some of the limitations that we have here in Europe. And so one of them, I started talking about the PH, so the PH of the soil in these regions tends to be high, high PH, and the American species not all of them perform well with these high PH soils. So what they did is they started breeding to find root stocks that performed better, then they were resistant to the phylloxera, but that they also were able to grow well in this high PH. And as they were doing these hybrids they came up with all these new varieties. And they are called the French- American hybrids and some of them are, I don't know if any of you recognize them, but they're varieties that we still grow now a days and we make wine out of them. So actually some of them, we do have them in our research stations and we have beautiful vines there and we produce wines there and we produce a lot of wine. And Foch, is for example, the variety that is mostly grown in Wollersheim Vineyards, so they grow that variety. It's an old variety and that is where it's coming from is this hybrid from the American cultivators, the American species and the Vitis Vinifera. So as people have started producing more and more of these hybrids for root stocks and then figuring out that actually they made decent wine, there were more and more interest in producing hybrids. 

In 1908, so very, very, very long time ago, they started in the University of Minnesota, a grape breeding program. So Elmer Swenson, that was actually from Wisconsin, he started working in 1969 in the University of Minnesota breeding grapes. And he actually made a lot, he was an officiant of grapes. He loved grapes. And he started making all these crosses and coming up with all these new varieties. By 1980, actually, he retired, but he released all of these varieties that you see here and some of them are not only wine grape varieties, but they are also table grape varieties. And so these varieties were resistant to the cold of Wisconsin and they made, actually, they do make very good wine. And they are these crosses between the first generation of the hybrids with more and more and more crosses of Vitis Vinifera. So what they did is they brought, they used the first generation of hybrids, hybrids that were created for the phylloxera and they started making new crosses with more Vitis Vinifera so that they could make a better, fruit with better quality, fruit that resemble a little bit more the Vitis Vinifera, the type of wine that they were used to drinking, they used to drink in Europe, the classic varieties, than the American species, so they didn't have so much of that very characteristic taste that the American species have. So what's striking is that this is a map that shows wineries in 1988, so you can see most of them are in California, you can see some there, especially in New York, the Finger Lakes, in that region in the 1980's, all the grapes that were grown there and the wineries were making wine out of some of the old hybrids and some of these hybrids that were coming from the result of the breeding efforts for root stocks. 

The Cayuga whites, for example, all of those varieties were a part of what they were producing there in the 1980s. Now, this is 2013, this explosion everywhere in the Midwest is due to all of these varieties that were released by the University of Minnesota and other breeding programs. Like at Cornell they also had a lot of effort, they put a lot of effort into breeding programs for new varieties that were actually able to resist the cold winters of the northern parts of the United States. So it's pretty striking. I just want to go back and forth. I love this slide. It's just crazy. Look at that. And that is a result of just new and new and new varieties. So here in Wisconsin I want to show this graph half from the 1970 all the way to 2010 the number of commercial vineyards, how they have grown exponentially due to all of these new varieties. 

The same way with the wineries. So now the slide here shows the wineries, the same thing. All of this is the product of a lot of effort into breeding new grape varieties that are able to resist the cold of the Midwest. What are the challenges that we have? Well, they're new, they're a completely different species. We've been growing Vitis Vinifera for thousands of years. We don't know how to grow them. There's so many things that are new, we don't know what type of trellis system does it like? Does it like to grow up or down? Because there are this mix of species, depending on what parents they have they have different growing habits. 

So some of them actually like to grow down. Some of them like to grow up. Which one is the best? We don't know. So we have to learn all of these new things. They produce, they are very vigorous, they produce a lot of leaves and shoots, how do we deal with that? If we know that we have very shaded canopies and we have a lot of leaves, the quality of the wine is not going to be good, so how do we deal with that problem? The fruit quality, it has this very distinct, some of them have this very distinctive flavors. How can we manipulate that to have fruit with better quality to make better wines? And so those, a lot of the challenges that we're dealing with, labor, it's very intensive. 

So how can we deal, what is the best way to grow them that requires the least labor? And so what are we doing is there is, we're part of a big project that is called the Northern Grape Project, in which 12 universities came together and we form a team of doing multiple research studies on how to grow them. We test them in different training systems. We test different techniques to learn how to grow them, because it's not only Wisconsin that is growing, but as the maps show, they're also in Michigan and Ohio, in all the Midwest and the northeast they're growing these new varieties, but the majority of us, we don't know how to grow them. They're so new that we don't know. And the majority of the work has been actually done by the growers. The growers planted these varieties and they experiment and they come up with solutions and new ideas and they tell us we don't know how to do this, what can we do? And so there's this constant feedback with the growers in trying to find solutions and new approaches on how to grow the grapes. So what I'm going to go through a little bit is what we're doing in our lab with some research projects, and here you can see my goofy students in the vineyard. And what we do in my lab is we do a lot of this figuring out how to grow this grape. 

So you can see the picture there of that vineyard. That vineyard is in west Madison, agriculture research station just 20 miles out of here to the west. And we have some vineyards there and we have a lot of studies going on. And one of them is on training systems. So how do we grow them? Do we like to grow with double trunks? Do they like to grow down? Do they like to grow up? Which is the best way? Which one produces the best fruit, the more fruit? 

Which one requires less labor? Those very basic studies that were done many, many, many years ago with Vitis Vinifera, where we know exactly how to grow them, we're doing them all over again with this new species. It's actually pretty interesting. And for me, coming from Chile, and everybody knows exactly how to grow the grapes there, it's just, it's a great opportunity because I don't think opportunities like this to grow, to work with something so new come very often in, as a fruit physiologist. Other things that we do here is look at some of the basic characteristics of the fruit itself. So we look at the brick, which is the sugar, we look at the PH of the juice and we look at the acidity of the juice. So all of these are some of the things that we measure to know how good those grapes are going to be for wine. And how we can manipulate them. So some of the studies that we do is like, okay, so how can we increase the sugar? We know that if we have more sugar it's going to produce more alcohol when it ferments. 

But we also know that these varieties in particular have high acid levels, so can we manipulate that acid level? When is the best time to harvest these grapes? You can see in this graph there, you can see different dates, so we sample over and over and over time figuring out how these different components change over time as we're approaching the harvest date so that we can find that when is the best time to harvest them. We know that if the PH goes very high when we ferment this juice what's going to happens is that very high PH allows for bacteria to grow so the wine is not going to last very long, so we need to find the middle point in which we have enough sugar to make enough alcohol but the PH doesn't go very high. And the acidity, also, we don't want very high acidity because that is not going to make a very good wine. We have to compromise on some things. We know that the wine has a very high acidity. So one of the things that wine makers are learning how to do is how to deal with them, how to deal with these high acidity, how to make the best out of these grapes and this wine and to teach people how to appreciate these different kind of wine. It's not Vitis Vinifera. It's never going to be Sauvignon Blanc. 

It's never going to be Pinot Noir. It's something different. It's either Marquette, Fontanelle, they're different and people have to learn how to drink these new wines if they want to drink wine made here from Wisconsin. So as I said before, there's all these collaborations between the grape growers, the wineries, the University, the Extension in which we all work together and come up with a new research idea, how to solve the problems. We're constantly communicating. And many of the new growing techniques or finding out which are the best techniques have come from experiments from the growers, which has, which are very, very innovative and they're taking all the risks in establishing these vineyards.

So with that, this is the local wineries. There's so many wineries. This is very good wine, and I'm from Chile. This is good wine. 

People are doing very interesting and different things. There's a lot of variety. They taste different, but they're good. And people, they are constantly coming up with new ideas, with new things. Go visit the vineyards. They're beautiful. It's amazing. I mean, by everywhere in Wisconsin there are vineyards. Almost in every county in Wisconsin there's a vineyard and there are wineries, so if you have the chance and you want to support the wine and the grape industry in Wisconsin, drink wine from Wisconsin. And with that, it was a very fast history class, but I'll be happy to answer any questions. 
[ Applause ]