The UC Davis Viticulture Collection
What is the Viticulture Collection?
The UC Davis Herbarium viticulture specimens are important in that they “voucher” (are specimens made during) the wine grape breeding research that has been done and is ongoing at UC Davis and in other parts of California. They are concrete proof of what plants researchers were referring to when they said that they were using a particular variety of wine grape. They are also vouchers for some of the seed collections in the USDA repository or UCD vineyards. These specimens will still be here long after the vineyards are abandoned and the seed in the repository is no longer viable. In 2000, with funding from the American Vineyard Foundation and the Bartholomew Foundation, we curated the viticulture herbarium, saving the specimens from disintegration.
1) The original Viticulture Herbarium
The original Viticulture Herbarium contains ca. 1,000 specimens collected between 1885 and 1920. Many of these specimens were collected in California and document what varieties were growing here at that time. They are all well-identified and very valuable. Many of the specimens were collected by Professor Biolleti, the first Professor of Viticulture at the University Farm. Others were collected by a Mr. Flossfeder, a German botanist who was employed as a viticulturalist at the University Farm.
2) Vitis collections of Harold P. Olmo
Dr. Olmo’s collections are an historic record of the wine grape varieties that were grown in California and other parts of the world between 1930 and 1980. Dr. Olmo was hired to be a Professor of Viticulture in the 1930s after the end of prohibition. At this time, there was renewed interest in wine studies, and Dr. Olmo was in charge of collecting the material upon which these studies were based. He did a survey of what grape varieties were being grown in California at that time (the 1930s and 1940s). He sought to identify all of the varieties based on morphology - leaf characteristics, such as lobing, veins, hairs, coloration and shoot tip/tendril characteristics.
Dr. Olmo introduced many of the grape cultivars used in California today. He vouchered his work with herbarium specimens, making herbarium collections of all of the varieties of wine grapes grown in California. He also introduced 100s of obscure cultivars from Greece, Portugal, Spain and the Middle East, many of which have very limited or unavailable written descriptions. He did rootstock trials and hybridization trials with these living collections, and he made herbarium vouchers to document these hybridization trials. His herbarium collections serve as a critical reference for comparison of leaf morphology and DNA fingerprints. They are excellent leaf and shoot-tip collections, which are all the parts that are needed to identify a specimen to variety.