Grape Harvest Found Free of Fraud : Wine: Last year, some California growers passed off cheap grapes as more expensive ones. But an inspection program has cleared the 1989 crop.

By DAN BERGER

Dec. 4, 1989 12 AM PT

TIMES WINE WRITER

During the recent wine grape harvest, inspectors found no cases of fraud similar to those that plagued the California wine industry last year, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

John Wiley, branch chief for the CDFA in Sacramento, said the wineries set up the Voluntary Varietal Inspection Program to monitor grape loads as they reached wineries. The program, funded by the wineries, appears to have halted any intentional acts of fraud.

A year ago, CDFA investigators, working with a team from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, found that a number of growers and harvesting companies were passing off cheap grapes as expensive grape varieties and charging the higher price fetched by the more expensive grapes. Sixteen civil suits seeking damages totaling $10 million were eventually filed.

“Based on the fraud that went on the year before, the wineries wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen again,” Wiley said. He said the inspection program furnished a supervisor and six inspectors who were trained in grape inspection.

Wiley said the inspection team received intense training “in the varieties we had had problems with--Chardonnay, Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc, as well as the peripheral varieties that you need to know, to see if they might have been slipped in.”

Inspectors spent most of their time in the San Joaquin Valley, which produced about 65% of the tonnage crushed in the state in 1989, Wiley said. Some inspections were done in the Napa and Sonoma county areas, and four wineries requested full-time inspectors.

Among the wineries that participated in the program were Mondavi (Woodbridge), Bronco, Gallo, Franzia, Delicato, Heublein (at its facilities at Escalon and Paicines), Corbett Canyon, Inglenook (Oakville), Beaulieu, Bear Creek, Vintners International and Golden State, Wiley said.

“The result was that we found absolutely no loads (of grapes) that were misrepresented, no fraud,” he said.

Some loads had mixed varieties in a single load, he said, but in checking the vineyard where the load was harvested, “what we found was a mixture of grapes in the vineyard. It appeared to be a result of planting impure (vine) bud wood, or confusion on the part of the grower as to what he had planted.”

“There were 42 loads where we found something in them that wasn’t supposed to be there. And the worst scenarios were simply finding some vineyards that need a lot of work, where Zinfandel was interplanted with Alicante Bouschet, Petite Sirah and other stuff. These were not cases of fraud; just a case of that’s the way it’s been done for years and years and years.”

Wiley said the loads found to have been marked incorrectly were re-marked properly on the spot. “We had nothing like the year before, where there were cheap varieties being sent in as expensive varieties.”

A report on the grape inspection program will be made Dec. 14 to the CDFA’s Wine Grape Inspection Advisory Committee in Sacramento.