UC Davis Oakville Research Station

Our new paper on mitigating heat wave damage to Cabernet Sauvignon with shade cloth and irrigation is published. You can read it here as an open source article: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles//fpls.2020.579192/full

Should you drop smoke impacted fruit or leave it on the grapevine? Check out our bulletin here: https://bit.ly/2G1cCG0 Spoiler: Leaving fruit on the grapevine has no adverse effects for next year's crop or for disease inoculum. #ucanr #ucdven

Preparing plots for seeding and compost spreading. What are we going to do next? ....

We harvested our trellis (6) x applied water (3) trial over two days. It wasn't easiest harvest but everybody pitched in!

Dear All: The UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology would like to provide as much useful information as possible about the potential risk of smoke impact, from recent events on the West Coast, to grape growers and winemakers. To that end, we are providing the following resources: 1) The West Coast Smoke Exposure Task Force Grape Sampling protocol: WCSETF Grape Sampling Protocol...Continue reading

Our Climate Change trial crush at the RMI winery. We are making three reps of the five treatments at 200 liters per lot.

Nothing wrong with an orange sky during midday. Is there? No ash on our grapes!

Check out our Summer 2020 newsletter. https://mailchi.mp//uc-davis-department-of-viticulture-eno

Congratulations to our Dr. Cliff Yu for new his paper in @FrontPlantSci in which we linked proximal sensing of soil texture to whole plant physiology and its cascading effects on berry and wine chemistry. Read more here: https://bit.ly/2Vh1EAL

Congratulations to our own Naza Torres for her initial, first author paper from UC Davis! Our open source paper investigated the optimal ranges of berry solar radiation exposure for upregulation of flavonoid biosynthesis and thresholds for their degradation on Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot, and evaluated how canopy management practices such as leaf removal, shoot thinning and a combination of both affect the yield components, berry composition and flavonoid profile of Cabernet Sauvignon. You can read more here: https://bit.ly/2CsRDtG

Our trip to our Fresno research site was a long but satisfying one. We collected our samples, and finished the round of measurements for our greenhouse gas emissions, carbon sequestration and grapevine agronomic performance at berry touch. The no-till plots that were planted to Poa bulbosa are still at -9.8 bars mid-day lead water potential while Hordeum sp. and volunteer cover crop are at -13.6 and -13 bars respectively one month after moving or terminating the cover crops. Excited

Congratulations to Kyle Cheung, the first graduate of the Digital Ag Lab for successfully defending his Thesis yesterday. Kyle has worked on two projects: 1. ...Aerial monitoring of turf for drought stress 2. Tree canopy profile analysis using 3D models During his graduate program at the Digital Ag Lab, Kyle has presented his work at several international evens such as SPIE, he received the best oral presentation award at 2019 ASABE annual meeting, and best poster award in ASABE California section meeting. Kyle also led the Team MicroSoil that won the Best Data and Analytics Prize for their rapid soil-borne pathogen test kit prototype at the international Digital Agriculture Hackathon hosted by @cornelluniversity AgriTech Kyle will start working at Corteva Agriscience as a Senior Imaging Data Analyst Thank you to Almond board of California, BAE department, @ucdaviscaes , @ucanr @ucdavisengineering and @UCRWater for supporting his graduate program. @ucdavis

Here is a chance to get the skinny on vineyard AI and mechanization!

Our 1000 km trip to and from Fresno this week. We are investigating till vs no-till practices with perennial and annual cover crops and their combinatory effects in carbon sequestration and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in vineyard systems. Thank you to the Wine Group for providing us the vineyards, tractors, implements with which to work in the San Joaquin Valley !

Our Grapevine Redblotch Disease trial is now underway. The study is funded by the USDA-NIFA.