The University of Arizona Alumnus — Summer 2007
THE MAGAZINE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ALUMNI ASSOCATION
Tending the Vine in Southern Arizona
John Begeman, director of the UA's Master Gardener Program, finds the perfect formula for growing and harvesting wine-making grapes in Tucson.
by Tim Vanderpool / photos by Jacob Chinn
We’re standing somewhere between heavenly spirits and the dry brown earth, here on the University of Arizona’s farm in midtown Tucson. To the south are ruby cabernet vines, emerging from thick wooden stalks, ranging along hefty metal supports, and then careening downward into the tough soil. To the north are more residents of this exotic neighborhood — the Shiraz, Tempranillo, Viognier, and Sauvignon Blanc vines, all yearning upwards in their ripening glory.
John Begeman ambles among these chlorophyllous contingents, glancing at black irrigation lines, inspecting stout leaves, and perusing the fledgling fruits. “We’ve got a pretty good crop of grapes coming on this year,” he says. “I think one thing that helped us was the cold weather. The grapes seem to respond pretty well to the cold, and this is a better grape crop than we’ve seen in the last two years.”
Begeman knows a good crop. He’s an urban horti-culture agent with the UA/Pima County Cooperative Extension, and directs its Master Gardener Program. These days he’s also in charge of the Vine to Wine project. That ambitious venture furnishes master gardener volunteers with the skills to create their own backyard vineyards. But it’s also helping put Arizona’s wine industry on the national map.
Key to their success is finding grape strains that flourish in low, hot regions. “It’s always been felt that you couldn’t produce a quality wine — especially red wine — from grapes grown in very hot climates,” Begeman says. “But I’ve been working with the commercial vineyards, looking at some of our varieties and what kind of color we can produce from a red-wine grape at this elevation.”
They’re inching ever closer to a breakthrough. “Industry people are looking at a variety of grapes in Spain — varieties currently being grown in hot regions, to see if some can be successfully grown here.” Another good candidate is the Shiraz, he says, “because it’s an Australian wine and hot-climate grape.”
Not that Arizona is currently unknown to the wine world, mind you. Only an hour’s drive from Begeman’s UA fields, the desert rises into a landscape dotted by corrals, sweeping valleys, and emerald vineyards. Cochise County’s highlands are this region’s answer to Napa Valley, and they’re centered around the tiny towns of Sonoita and Elgin. Ranching still sets the tone there: bucolic windmills are de rigueur, horses roam in huge fenced pastures, and the old railroad tracks still course through tiny towns.
But the area’s cattle now graze alongside ripening grapes, a pastoral mélange dating back several decades, to when a UA soil scientist named Gordon Dutt discovered growing conditions — cooler temperatures and high elevations — nearly identical to those in Burgundy, France. He took this discovery to heart at his still-thriving Sonoita Vineyards.
Today, labels such as Dutt’s, and that of nearby Callaghan Vineyards, are garnering international awards, getting write-ups in swanky magazines such as Wine Enthusiast and Wine Spectator, and being served at White House dinners.
Just southeast of Sonoita, a rustic, onetime brothel has been reborn as the Village of Elgin Winery. Not far away, and up a bouncy dirt driveway, you’ ll find Dutt’s vineyards, where he produces his Sonoita Fumé — crisp with a hint of oak — and the Cochise County Colombard, which is a zesty, back-country take on the French classic.
These vintners range from scientists like Dutt to a Hollywood director, a congressman, college professors, and an air-line pilot. And the Sonoita-Elgin area is officially recognized by the federal government as an American Viticulture Area, meaning it has the features — soil and climate — uniquely suited to grape growing.
Arizona now has 22 wineries and 24 vineyards, with an $18 million impact on the state, according to the Arizona Wine Growers Association. And that’s one hefty reason for ongoing research at the UA vineyards.
While Arizona’s best wine-growing has occurred in southern Arizona — at elevations of 3,500 to 4,500 feet — Begeman and his volunteers hope to find a wine grape suitable for 2,500-feet elevations and temperatures routinely topping 100 degrees. It’s heady work for a little 2.5-acre operation amid bustling Tucson.
But such challenges are nothing new for vineyards begun nearly two decades ago by UA plant scientist Michael Kilby. Like Begeman, Kilby worked closely with commercial grape growers, gauging various grapes, trellis systems, and other vine-yard accoutrements for their suitability.
The UA vineyards flourished until Kilby’s retirement in 2002. Disrepair had set in by the time Begeman was brought on board, and he quickly set about bringing those 800 vines back to life. It was a brilliant stroke: not only did Begeman tote years of experience, but he also came with his own cadre of master gardener volunteers. Those green thumbs spend at least 50 hours each year in community service. They provide gardening programs, plant clinics, and in the case of these vineyards, planting, pruning, crushing, and bottling.
If that sounds like great fun, it is. But there’s also plenty of hard work involved. “We assigned one master gardener to each row,” Begeman says. “They’re responsible for doing all the general care of that row, the pruning, weeding, and any training of the vines.
“It’s a learning process for volunteers. But as they learn how grapes grow and how to prune grapes, they can also help home gardeners around Tucson who are interested in doing the same. There is a lot of interest in growing grapes at home, and in wine-making.”
There also are plenty of commercial growers following this program and monitoring its suc-cess. Among them is Rod Keeling, president of the Arizona Wine Growers Association, and co-owner of Keeling-Schaefer Vineyards in southeast Arizona. “Over the past 20-plus years, a lot of the basic work that has enabled the wine industry to get started in Arizona was done by or with the UA,” Keeling says.
Now that work is paying off. “I think the future is very bright for Arizona wine. We’re seeing more investment and acceptance in the marketplace than ever before. The industry has expanded by at least 100 percent since 2002 in every category.”
The next step is bringing that expansion into Arizona’s low country. Growing good grapes in the middle of a desert is a challenge, Begeman admits. “It has a lot to do with accu-mulation of heat and the number of days above 95 degrees. That seems to affect color on certain varieties. But we’ve also been finding that, at initial stages, we’ve been able to produce wine with very good color on some of our red-wine varieties, especially the Tempranillo and Barbera.
“Of course that would stand to reason, because they’re Italian and Spanish wine grapes that grow in very hot regions. As does Shiraz. We’ve had good results with Shiraz because it’s an Australian wine and hot-climate grape.”
Good luck translates into good wine. And that’s good news for the dedicated souls who tend these verdant rows, patiently shep-herding grapes from vine to bottle. According to Begeman, the news just keeps getting better. “The past summer was our second year of winemaking, and there was some spoilage. It’s a learning process in what we’re doing, and we ended up with a small amount of wine.”
But production is on an upswing with help from former vintner Frank DiCristofano. “This year there was very little spoilage,” Begeman says. “We had 70 gallons, which is about 250 bottles.”
Not surprisingly, that end-product is part of Begeman’s volunteer-recruitment tool kit. He’s been able to give his vol-unteers use of the farm’s tiny winery and its little cellar. “I was thinking, originally, it might be hard to just go and get people to tend grapes,” he says. “But with the possibility of seeing it all the way through to the final stages of wine-making, we might have a lot of interest. And we did.”
He says the volunteers “are very conscientious and precise. They’ve been able to do a very good job in training and pruning the vines. So we’re improving the overall health of the vineyard, and getting better-quality grapes when we go to harvest.”
That’s no easy chore. Begeman’s crew also has learned that it’s a labor of love. “I have discovered that growing grapes can be very labor-intensive,” he says. “It’s not for the faint of heart, because of the work you have to do here in the summer with our grapes.”
For one thing, they have to drape nets across the rows as the grapes mature, as protection from fruit-loving birds. “Netting and harvesting, when it’s 95 to 100-degree-heat in June and July — that can be very challenging,” he says.
If that weren’t enough, Arizona throws one more complication into the mix: summer monsoons. The weather has to be dry enough before harvest-time that sugar becomes concentrated in the grapes. “For example, California summers are dry and the weather is fairly stable,” says Begeman. “But in Arizona, we have summer monsoons, and they dilute the sugar content in grapes.”
Sometimes those monsoons blow in just when grapes are ripened to harvesting perfection. “Then all of a sudden we get an inch or more of rain,” says Begeman. “And we have to post-pone the harvest and wait for the sugar content to rise again.”
When that happens, you just cross your fingers and wait. But that wait can promise a delicious pay-off, down here between the heavenly spirits and the dry brown earth.