What's newGrape muralists deal with an early harvest
This summer’s record-early harvest may have been a blessing for eager growers and winemakers, but it’s turning into a nightmare for the Kahlos and Picassos creating murals at the Grape Festival.
The festival’s annual grape mural competition, in which harvested grapes are arranged to create images consistent with the theme of the festival, relies on having fresh fruit set aside by growers. This summer’s harvest came weeks ahead of schedule, however, and organizers are scrambling to insure that grapes are available for murals.
Some will pick the fruit and keep it refrigerated. Others will leave it on the vine and hope it stays fresh in the heat. Either way, the shortage of fruit can create a sticky situation for the muralists making art at the festival, said Mark Armstrong, general manager of the Lodi Grape Festival and Harvest Fair.
“You’ll find as many as 10,000 grapes in a mural,” Armstrong said. “It’s going to be hard to get some of the white grapes like chardonnays.”
Grapes for white wines, including chardonnay, pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc, are typically picked earlier in the harvest when their sugar contents are lower. The harvest season usually begins in mid-August, but moderate warm temperatures since early March allowed the grapes to develop ahead of schedule.
Black grapes, such as zinfandel, merlot and cabernet sauvignon, are still being harvested and remain fresh. Most of the green and gold grapes, however, were picked three weeks to a month ago.
To hold onto those grapes, some of the growers who donate them will place the fruit in cold storage to keep it fresh. Refrigeration works when the grapes are stored for only a few days, but weeks in freezing temperatures isn’t a good thing for the fruit, said Brad Kissler, safety and compliance director at Mohr-Fry Vineyards.
“They just don’t look as well when they go into cold storage,” Kissler said. “As soon as you take them out and the air hits them, they’ll turn brown real fast.”
The problem is that Lodi grows different varieties of grapes than it did when the festival began nearly 70 years ago, said Mark Chandler, executive director of the Lodi-Woodbridge Winegrape Commission. Back then, the vast majority of grapes were table varieties that took longer to mature.
Now that the district specializes in different varieties that come off the vine far sooner than before, muralists are left struggling to find grapes for their projects, he said.
“We’ve been talking for a decade about planting a vineyard that could grow those varieties for the muralists to work with,” Chandler said. “If you have a few growers that take it seriously, you could probably solve the problem.”
Though setting aside grapes for the mural competition is no easy task, it’s well worth it when the results are displayed at the festival, Armstrong said. That is, until the heat and sun gets a hold of them.
“Usually by Sunday they have fruit flies all over them,” Armstrong said. “They don’t have any long-term value.”
