Indigenous North American grapevines, not the standard European varieties, may be California wine’s answer to climate change – San Francisco Chronicle

It’s not just California that loves vinifera. European grapevines are the standard fare for wineries as far afield as South Africa, Australia and South America. The reason is simple: vinifera vines, everyone agrees, make the best-tasting wines.

But Niess, a winemaker in Sonoma County, views this widely accepted tenet as absurd. As many as 40 different grape species are native to this continent, he points out, yet California growers plant only one species from somewhere else.

“We have our own native plants here, and nobody is talking about them,” says Niess. He believes that wines made from native North American grapes, and specifically native Californian grapes, have simply not yet been given their due. He’s trying to give them a chance now, and has convinced farmers in Solano, Sonoma and Mendocino counties to let him plant some vines on their properties.

All told, he’s got about 30 different grape varieties in the works, all of them hybrids — bred crossings of vinifera with native North American grape species. By next year, he’ll have another 30 hybrid varieties in the ground. He plans to farm and vinify them with just as much care as one would put into Pinot Noir.

Returning native North American hybrid grapes to these soils is more than just a cute philosophical idea. Due to climate change, it may become a necessity. Vinifera can’t grow in extreme heat, humidity or cold; already, in some parts of California, it’s dying from maladies like Pierce’s disease, which proliferates in hot environments and whose creep may expand as it gets hotter. Even successful vinifera vineyards here are often treated with chemical insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, which may be harmful to people and the environment.

All of these factors have made this moment ripe for hybrid wines to at last find a receptive audience after centuries of ridicule. Thanks to the natural wine movement, wine drinkers’ palates are primed for flavors that are new and different, and for wines that might have once been considered off-putting. Add to that a growing interest in food grown organically without pesticides or other chemical inputs, and a mounting awareness of agriculture’s role in climate change, and hybrid wines could be primed for success.

Niess isn’t the only California vintner who feels this way. Highly reputable winemakers including Chuck Wagner of Napa’s Caymus Vineyards and Adam Tolmach of the Ojai Vineyard are already making wine from hybrid grapes — in their case, new varieties developed by UC Davis specifically for their resistance to a destructive disease. Another Sonoma County winemaker, Jason Ruppert of Ardure Wines, is working with Nevada-grown hybrids and has plans to plant more on the Sonoma Coast.

To this growing movement of winegrowers, hybrids offer a simple solution to the most pressing agricultural conundrum of our age. Instead of trying to adapt vinifera to an increasingly hostile climate, look to grapevines that are already adapted to this place.

“Why would you not want to grow something that’s easier and more sustainable to farm?” Niess says.

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California, with its moderate Mediterranean climate, has long been a vinifera-friendly bubble, but many parts of the U.S. have never been able to grow the European grape species. The Northeast is too cold, the Southeast too humid. Wineries in these areas grow hybrid grapevines, which scientists have bred to select for the best of both worlds. A hybrid’s vinifera parent bequeaths the good looks: those delicious, European-esque wine flavors. The non-vinifera parent, a North American species, hands down the survival skills: disease resistance, cold hardiness, drought tolerance.

Other U.S. states have developed wine industries based on hybrids. Go to a tasting room in Minnesota and you may see labels with hybrid grape names like Marquette and La Crescent; Georgia, and the wines may be made from Norton; Illinois, and it could be Chambourcin or Vidal Blanc. Outside of their local markets, they seldom get respect. Although a handful of hybrid winemakers like La Garagista and Iapetus in Vermont have gained national followings, the global fine-wine industry largely dismisses hybrids as producing weird, gross-tasting wines.

The primary offender is often said to be the “foxy” flavor that can appear in hybrid wines. This pejorative wine-jargon term typically refers to a musky, animalistic smell, sometimes compared to the aroma of a fur coat. It can also manifest as an intense grapeyness. Foxiness is most often found in Vitis labrusca, a species that includes the Concord grape, and the flavor is thought to be related to the compound methyl anthranilate, which is used to flavor grape soda, candy and other industrial food products.

But not all hybrids taste foxy, and Niess isn’t sure foxiness is necessarily a curse. “I have not yet been convinced that native grapes have to make bad wine,” he says. If some hybrid wines taste bad, he argues, maybe that’s just a sign that we haven’t come up with the proper techniques for them yet. People have been refining winemaking methods for vinifera wines for more than 1,000 years.

Even the meteorological paradise that is California will eventually see its hand forced, Niess believes, and will have to adapt. The state is already beset by drought, warming temperatures and erratic weather patterns that have increased disease pressure for vinifera grapevines, and the forecast looks bleak. If average temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius, 51% of all winegrowing areas in the world may no longer be suitable for vinifera unless major changes are implemented, according to a 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The history of vinifera in California is inextricable from the history of colonization. Species including Vitis californica and Vitis girdiana, known colloquially as the wild desert grape, have long grown here (and still do). The Spanish colonizers of the 18th century do not appear to have been much interested in these wild grapes. Instead, they brought a vinifera cultivar from the Canary Islands that came to be known as Mission. At the Franciscan missions, sites of brutal oppression and enslavement of Indigenous Americans, the Mission grape was cultivated for sacramental wine.

“People thrived here, eating and living off the land for millennia,” says Niess. “The Europeans came here and wanted it to look like Europe.”

Niess’ interest in native grapes began with an interest in native plants generally. In college, when he learned that most people were not planting their gardens with Californian flowers and grasses that didn’t require watering, his mind was blown. He began to feel that our entire ecosystem was out of whack, and saw the rise of invasive plant species as evidence that something had gone terribly wrong.

While working as the assistant winemaker at Radio-Coteau, an acclaimed Pinot Noir winery in Sonoma County, Niess encountered a farmer who was taking care of a small backyard vineyard in Sebastopol, in the Russian River Valley AVA. The site, just three-quarters of an acre, had been planted in the 1960s to Baco Noir, a hybrid of Vitis vinifera and the indigenous American species Vitis riparia, and had never made commercial wine. In 2019, Niess jumped at the chance to take over the farming. He left his job to start his own, hybrid-focused wine label, North American Press.

But to create a business, Niess needed more than just three-quarters of an acre of Baco Noir. So he took out classified ads and posted on online industry boards, asking if any winegrowers would be willing to take a chance and plant some hybrids on their properties. Most growers he encountered were adamantly opposed — strangers, in fact, went to the trouble of calling him just to tell him it was a terrible idea — but Niess managed to convince a few to let him experiment. That’s how he ended up with 30 different varieties planted at ZZZ Ranch, in Healdsburg’s Dry Creek Valley, and King Andrews Vineyard in Solano County’s Suisun Valley. With plantings planned at two additional sites, Old World Winery in Russian River Valley and Alder Springs in Mendocino County, Niess will have about 60 hybrid grapes in the ground by this time next year.

Already, Niess says, these vines have proven much easier to farm than their vinifera counterparts. The Baco Noir vines, for example, are in an area where powdery mildew is a threat. But unlike nearby Pinot Noir plantings, which would likely be sprayed with fungicides to prevent mildew, the Baco Noir withstands this pressure on its own. “I have never sprayed the Baco Noir vines with any fungicides and have not noticed any powdery mildew,” Niess says.

Some of the varieties Niess is trying at the other vineyards are well established in other parts of the U.S., like Catawba, which is big in Ohio. Others are less tried, like Ramona, a crossing of Mission with girdiana, the wild desert grape native to Southern California. The goal over time is to breed even more, focusing specifically on the girdiana and californica species, to select for grape varieties that require as little nurturing as possible in California’s climate — no irrigation, no insecticides, nothing.

While many of the hybrids popular in other parts of the U.S., like Seyval Blanc and Traminette, have distinctly French-sounding names (presumably, to make them sound more like serious wine grapes), some of the grapes Niess is working with sound almost comically plebian: Delicatessen. Extra. Ellen Scott. Mrs. Munson.

It’s still early days — most of these plantings are still too young to bear fruit — but the results so far are encouraging. North American Press’ 2019 Baco Noir is a lovely wine. Floral and earthy, with an iron-tinged sanguinity, it reminds me of the Sicilian (vinifera) wine Nero d’Avola, with the rustic delicacy of Cabernet Franc. There’s not a hint of foxiness.

Other efforts with hybrids are similarly exciting. Last year, winemaker Jason Ruppert of Ardure Wines bought hybrid fruit from Job’s Peak Vineyard in Nevada, near Lake Tahoe. His early efforts, which I tasted from the barrel, are promising, in particular a blend of the red grape St. Croix and the white grape Brianna, which smells like rock candy and has a chalky texture with a pleasantly bitter bite. Ruppert has plans to plant hybrids at a vineyard in Jenner, on the Sonoma Coast, and at Cole Ranch, a famous vineyard in Mendocino County.

At the forefront of California’s hybrid development is Andy Walker, professor of viticulture and enology at UC Davis, who has spent decades breeding hybrids resistant to Pierce’s disease. This bacterial disease, fatal to grapevines, has made viticulture untenable in parts of Southern California such as the Ojai Vineyard, which due to Pierce’s disease has been fallow since 1995. Pierce’s is even a problem in Napa Valley, specifically in vineyards that abut the Napa River, which is what compelled Chuck Wagner of Caymus to work with the Walker-developed hybrids.

Ojai’s owner, Adam Tolmach, isn’t too concerned about the marketing challenges of selling his new wines. He plans to call his two bottlings simply Estate Red and Estate White. The hope is that customers will focus on the place of origin, understanding them to be expressions of the Ojai Vineyard, and not get hung up on the specific grape varieties.

None of this is to say that many hybrid wines, even well-made ones, do not taste meaningfully different from the vinifera many of us are used to. They often do. Some are very acidic; others have low tannin, leaving a red wine with a curious absence of structure and grip. Many that I’ve tasted have a jarringly candied, Jolly Rancher candy-like impression.

The challenge for these varieties will be not just figuring out the proper farming and vinification protocols; it will also require a recalibration of our collective palates, and an openness to the idea that wine can taste a lot of different ways. This recalibration is already under way, albeit in less radical forms, as wine drinkers embrace styles of natural wine that diverge from classic flavor profiles, from funky petillant naturel sparkling wines to the lightly colored, bubblegum-inflected reds made by the alternative fermentation method of carbonic maceration.

“In every other agricultural undertaking, people welcome progressive scientific change,” says Tolmach. “In the wine business, we’re still stuck on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.”

Tolmach still loves Pinot and Chardonnay, too. Who doesn’t? But he’s amazed by how naturally the hybrids have taken to his vineyard. “They’re just some of the 14,000 grape varieties that you can make into wine,” he says. “Most of all, it feels good to grow something I don’t need to spray poisons on.”

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley