The Decanter interview: Carole Meredith

Plant geneticist Dr Carole Meredith helped to change the way that winemakers think about the history of grapes – and now she is growing her own in Napa Valley. Elin McCoy meets her

High on Napa’s Mt Veeder, Carole Meredith points out the burned trees on the 34ha estate she owns with her winemaker husband, Steve Lagier – the result of 2017’s devastating wildfires. ‘We were lucky. The flames didn’t reach the house, and only singed a few vines, but we could have lost it all.’

Making wine full time under the Lagier Meredith label is the ‘third era’ of Dr Meredith’s distinguished career, which includes 22 years at the University of California at Davis as a grape geneticist, aka ‘a vine sleuth’. In the Department of Viticulture and Enology, she pioneered DNA fingerprinting to unravel the parentage and history of grape varieties, resolved speculation about where Zinfandel comes from, and built an international network of researchers to establish a grape DNA database.

Scroll down for the Lagier Meredith wines tasting notes

Along the way, she scooped up a slew of honours, including the French Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole and induction into the Vintners Hall of Fame. She retired from her academic position in 2003. ‘I don’t miss it, especially the long commute between Mt Veeder and Davis,’ she says, then smiles. ‘I survived with the help of Starbucks coffee and audio books.’

Science and nature

While we talk she grabs her camera to take a shot of a hummingbird hovering by a feeder on her deck. The winery’s Facebook page – Meredith is very active on social media – shows stunning photos of birds, as well as equally stunning views from the house and vineyards, which sit at 400m. Her present to herself after the wildfires was a $5,000 camera with serious telephoto lenses.

With her short white hair, rimless glasses and no-nonsense way of speaking, it’s easy to imagine her, white coated, in a lab, changing the way we think about the history of grapes. She often says: ‘I don’t like to follow the rules.’

As we tour the 1.8ha vineyard, she fills me in on her wandering route to genetics research. ‘I was born in Wales, and my family moved to Canada, before settling in Orinda, California. Growing up, I loved science and books like The Golden Book of Astronomy, but by high school I’d settled on biology.’

She majored in biological sciences at Davis, took on an assortment of unrelated jobs, learned how to metal cast sculptures (a grey cast telephone sits on her deck), indulged in playing bridge and smoking pot, and married for the first time.

Employment at a plant nursery led her to botany courses and graduate school at Davis, where she studied plant genetics under a famous tomato expert. ‘After I got my PhD, I was offered jobs at places like Monsanto and went to work at an agricultural chemical company. But I started thinking science should benefit humanity and talked to professors at Davis about a career in academia,’ she explains

The grape geneticist

What shifted Meredith to grapes, in 1980 – and changed her life, both personal and professional – was being hired by the Department of Viticulture and Enology at Davis to take the place of distinguished professor Harold Olmo, who was retiring.

‘Basic plant genetics is applicable to any plant,’ she explains. ‘So although I hadn’t worked with grapes, it wasn’t a total stretch. Grape genetics had focused on traditional grape breeding to develop new varieties for commercial purposes.

‘Biotechnology was emerging as a way of looking at plants at the cellular and molecular level, giving hope it could speed up the breeding process. I started out with the idea of using genetic engineering to create improved grapes, but new DNA profiling tools fascinated me more,’ she says.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time of huge genetic breakthroughs. After learning about newly discovered human DNA markers, she and a PhD student of hers, John Bowers, decided to work on developing a toolkit of markers for the world’s classic grapes, to establish identities and relationships.

‘No single lab had the financial resources to do that. So I contacted grape geneticists around the world and gathered 20 members in 10 countries to develop genetic markers in grapes, pool the results of our individual efforts, and build a database.’

Before DNA fingerprinting, an expert had to visually examine leaf and fruit characteristics to identify an unknown grapevine. Extracting DNA from a vine and analysing the microsatellite markers made it possible to build a database of hundreds of varieties for the first time, offering an easier way to identify an unknown grape variety and discern its relationship to others. Because grape varieties had been transported around the world, original names were sometimes lost and there was plenty of confusion. For decades, winemakers in Chile mistakenly thought Carmenère was Merlot, for instance.

Meredith’s big breakthrough, in 1996, was discovering that Cabernet Sauvignon was the child of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc, all three varieties being native to France. The surprise was that parentage included both a red and a white grape.

She and Bowers started delving into the genetic origins of other varieties, such as Syrah. ‘Our work disproved the idea it came from [the city of] Shiraz in Persia. It came from France, and its parents are Mondeuse Blanche, a grape from the Savoie, and Dureza.’

On the personal side, Davis was also where Meredith met Steve Lagier. He was doing a master’s in winemaking and running a research programme at Davis. She had split from her first husband, and in 1984 she and Lagier bonded over skiing and having fun – even though, she says, ‘my first impression was that he was a joker and not for me.’

The two like to play off one another; Lagier insists on telling me about Meredith’s paper in the prestigious magazine Science, which recounts her discovery that Pinot Noir and Goulaise Blanc are the parents of some 16 grape varieties.

Tribidrag revelation

Meredith’s best-known achievement, though, was solving the mystery of Zinfandel, long thought of as California’s own grape. ‘It’s the same as Primitivo in southern Italy, but the Italians knew that it only arrived 200 or 300 years ago. So I looked across the Adriatic to Croatia. But I didn’t know any scientists there.’

Things started looking up when a professor at the University of Zagreb asked for Meredith’s help in trying to understand their indigenous varieties. This was the opportunity she had been looking for. As a result of the collaboration, ‘Eventually,’ she says, ‘we found Zinfandel in Croatia, on the verge of extinction. It was identical to an obscure grape on the Dalmatian coast known as Crljenak Kaštelanski.’

More knowledge was added when the researchers found an older-named variety called Pribidrag (also called Tribidrag, the grape’s oldest name), which also turned out to be Zinfandel. Historians discovered Croatia’s wines had been traded with Venice as long ago as the Middle Ages. ‘It was an important, noble grape,’ says Meredith. That discovery was the capstone of her academic career.

Adventures in winemaking

The grapes Lagier and Meredith grow on their property have inevitable links to Meredith’s research. But in 1985, when they followed the rutted dirt road up Mt Veeder (now mercifully paved), they weren’t looking to make wine commercially. He was running the lab at Robert Mondavi Winery, and later became a winemaker there; she was a full-time academic.

‘Nobody wanted the property, but it was what we could afford,’ Meredith says. ‘It had a ramshackle house, some cleared land, a forest with redwoods, madrones and Douglas firs, and a small grove of olive trees. Mt Veeder wasn’t even an AVA. But we were lucky. What makes our land special is that it’s in the cooler part of Mt Veeder and the soil isn’t volcanic, but fractured shale and sandstone.’

Originally, the couple thought they’d grow a few vines to make wine for themselves, but just preparing the land took them eight years. ‘We had to dig out tree roots and let the fragments die off – if they had oak root fungus that would kill any grape vines.’

Instead of Napa’s typical Cabernet Sauvignon, they first planted Syrah. ‘We loved the flavours, and in 1992, one of my students, Jean-Louis Chave, visited and said, “Carole, Syrah will do well here because the grape loves a view.” That was confirmation. Our first vintage was 1996, and Steve left Mondavi in 1999 to make our wine full time.

‘Our friends said it was good,’ she recalls. ‘So we released 74 cases in 2000. Because of my work, we planted Mondeuse Noire vines next, in 2007. Our wine is very different to Mondeuse from the Savoie – it’s rich and spicy.’

Planting Zinfandel, which they did in 2010, was a given. And in 2013, they convinced federal regulators to let them use the historic name Tribidrag on the label.

Doing everything themselves, they follow their own low-intervention ideas, and even when new oak was having its heyday in Napa they continued to buy used barrels.

‘It’s hard for small producers like us to survive and get attention today,’ she says. ‘The Napa Valley we knew has changed. Big money has moved in and things are, well, polarised.’

Genetic advances

For Meredith, the future of grape genetics is full of important questions. ‘Since I retired, new gene-editing technology means you can alter a gene to make it do what you want, like produce grapes with resistance to a disease. But if we tinker with genes in Chardonnay, is it still Chardonnay? That will be a legal question.’

She continues: ‘What’s going to be important to winemakers and drinkers is understanding exactly how grape genes interact with the environment. That will start telling us more precisely how grapes – and wine – can reflect terroir, the place where the vine is grown. And that’s what everyone is so very interested in today.’

A taste of Lagier Meredith:

Elin McCoy is an award-winning journalist and author who writes for Bloomberg News.