Posted on 03/28/2010 7:29:27 PM PDT by Touch Not the Cat
One of the dirty secrets of California's wine country is now on everyone's lips. Somehow a voracious grape-eating moth has found its way nonstop from Europe to the heart of the Napa Valley, the land of three-figure cabernet. With valuable fruit at risk, the region's fast and loose play with federal agriculture quarantine laws is getting new scrutiny from investigators and researchers.
Suitcase smuggling is the winked-at act of sneaking in cane cuttings to clone vines from France's premier vineyards, hoping to replicate success. Vintners say it helped build a handful of exceptional vineyards in the 1980s when U.S. plant choices were limited and import testing took seven years.
As California clamps a quarantine across the heart of Napa Valley and farmers ready their pesticides, nobody is winking anymore. A new Napa reality is setting in-- that lax attitudes invite costly invasions of new pests that can threaten the country's most expensive and economically productive farmland.
"There are people who continue to spin their tales of smuggled plant material. People like a story with a glass of wine, and what that tends to do is legitimize behavior that not only threatens the industry, it's illegal," said Greg Clark, deputy agricultural commissioner for Napa County. "Knock it off."
A handful of California's best vintners today admit to having used "suitcase cloning" to avoid yearslong waits in USDA quarantine for their vines.
Their stories of success after stuffing cane buds down pants legs and in backpacks romanticized an outlaw behavior that, even if it's not directly responsible for a coming wave of vineyard spraying over most of Napa Valley, has reminded growers that one person's miscalculation can affect them all.
"The question is 'Who brought it in?" asks Jim Lincoln, who manages 400 acres of grapes in the quarantine area.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Yep, they're getting really tough! I bet that stern statement will stop all this smuggling. How would you stop someone from sneaking in a tiny peice of grapevine anyway? Heck you could tie it around your wrist and it would look like some new age hippy bracelet.
Doesn’t Pill-o-see have a vinyard/winery? *Grins*.
Actually, much of the European crop has survived due to transplants from America, my Sicilian uncle tells me.
It works both ways.
Clearly, they need to grant amnesty to all formerly illegal vines. That will solve all the problems.
All sorts of folks could have done it...what would prevent the Chileans, New Zealanders, and any number of Euros trying to destroy the crop?
What we need are improved grape varieties ~
Shall the American vintners take responsibility, or blame the French? Blaming the French works for me.
I have read that Zinfandel and a few lesser known varieties, especially those native to Italy and Greece, have been reintroduced to Europe from America. I have no proof, but I suspect that European's Muslim population was introduced from the United States in one of the shipments.
Unless there’s some kind of die off.
When I was a kid, my parents had two huge grape vines that I took care of from the time they were just two little twigs. They outgrew their arbor and grew up a nearby telephone pole, across the wire, to the house, and down the side of the house.
Then one year long after I left home, they just didn’t leaf out. Spring came. Summer came. Nothing. Just dead wood.
OK...you lost me with that one...
Instead of greedy capitalists as the cause, it could be economic warfare (sabotage) from other places that grow grapes. Moth eggs are tiny and can be easily mailed.
And to think my customers have all kinds of trouble with their grapes up here. Between not pruning them properly (VERY important) to not feeding them, to the Japanese Beetle attacks - it’s a wonder anyone gets ANY grapes, LOL!
I’m off to the trenches! :)
I would not be surprised if this was deliberate act from one of the European vineyard owners?
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