What's newFestival has evolved with local wine industry
By Greg Kane
News-Sentinel Business Editor
There was a time when many of the vineyards surrounding Lodi blossomed with the Flame Tokay, a purple-red grape used largely as table grapes and for jug wines. The grape was one of the lead characters in the city’s wine culture of the time, lending its name to both local high schools, two roadways and a variety of area businesses.
Mark Armstrong
When the Lodi Grape Festival began following a dispute between growers and pickers in 1937, the town was celebrating the harvest of these and other table grape varieties — including the still-popular zinfandel. The vast majority of grapes harvested in town were then pooled together and shipped to outside wineries.
“When you look back, the Grape Festival then focused more on table grapes than winegrapes,” said Mark Armstrong, general manager of the Lodi Grape Festival and Harvest Fair. “Probably any wine (from Lodi) was made with Tokay grapes back then.”
In the 67 years since that first celebration, the festival has evolved with Lodi’s grape growing and winemaking industry. The Flame Tokay has been replaced with such specialized varieties as cabernet sauvignon, syrah and chardonnay, many of which are being used in local wineries instead of being shipped out of town.
“(The Grape Festival) is becoming more representative of the wine side nowadays than it has been traditionally,” said Mark Chandler, executive director of the Lodi-Woodbridge Winegrape Commission. “It started out as a table grape festival, but over the past decade, more wine content has been inserted into the offerings.”
The black, green and gold fruit remains a major focus of the four-day event, with a grape stomp, grape murals and competitions for the best-looking fruit among the festivities. Though the varieties have changed from strictly zinfandel and Flame Tokay, the celebration is still centered on growing instead of winemaking, Armstrong said.
“Our focus is more on the grape than the product it makes,” Armstrong said.
However, Lodi’s ever-expanding wine industry has made itself a presence at the festival. Lodi labels, including Harmony Wynelands, Vino Con Brio, Oak Ridge, Kreig’s Kellar, Klinker Brick, Berghold, Jewel and Van Ruiten, will take part in the Taste of the Festival event on Wednesday, Sept. 15, the evening before the festival begins.
Different varieties of Van Ruiten wines will also be available to festival-goers throughout the weekend. Van Ruiten is the official winery of this year’s festival, the first time such a designation has been made, Armstrong said.
Wine has always played a part in the festival, but for a long time the finished product ended up being brought in from outside wineries, Armstrong said. Though wine was produced in town, it was never on a large enough scale to compete with E&J Gallo and the large co-op wineries.
Some of the harvest traditions from this time remain with the festival today. In the grape judging competition, points are deducted if the clusters are packed wrong or aren’t covered in bloom dust, just as folks who bought the grapes years ago would have done, said Brad Kissler, safety and compliance director for Mohr-Fry Vineyard.
“The way they used to do it years ago, they shipped a heck of a lot of grapes out of here by railcar,” Kissler said. “The people don’t want to see mishandled fruit on the other end, so they’re trying to keep them in the most natural state possible.”
Lodi’s wine culture began to change in the late 1970s, when Robert Mondavi purchased Woodbridge Winery. The presence of Mondavi, a giant in the winemaking industry, gave the region some clout, and local winemakers started encouraging growers to plant more winegrape varieties.
The Flame Tokay, once a staple in the region, went by the wayside, Armstrong said.
“You used to see Tokay vines all over the place years ago,” he said. “Now you hardly see them at all anymore.”
The Lodi Appellation today features wineries of all sizes — a change that is reflected in the wines pouring at the festival each year. Where there were once only a handful of local wineries participating, recent festivals have featured dozens of Lodi labels, Armstrong said.
“Before, we’d get Eastside Winery, some Mondavi and maybe a few others,” he said. “Now we have 20 to 25 labels out there. I’ve just watched this transformation from grower to winemaker happen overnight.”
New winegrape varieties have changed more than just the wine content at the festival. They’ve also led to adjustments in the ways organizers prepare for and judge the various competitions.
The influx of earlier ripening winegrapes has forced some growers to put fruit in cold storage so it’s ready for the mural and grape stomp competitions, Chandler said. Table grapes, which require high sugar contents, stay on the vine far longer and are typically still fresh in September.
The packing competition is also modified when dealing with winegrapes, Kissler said. Table grapes are usually packed with their stems sticking up, while winegrapes are usually laid flat in rows, he said.
“You see less and less table grapes and more winegrapes being displayed every year,” Kissler said. “We don’t really grow the table grapes anymore in Lodi.”
This year’s Lodi Grape Festival and Harvest Fair will run from Thursday, Sept. 16 through Sunday, Sept. 19.
Contact Business Editor Greg Kane at gregk@lodinews.com.
