On a warm July morning, Marcus Meadows-Smith navigates the rows at Great Bear Vineyards. He points out an area with a varietal developed at ɫɫ to be climate tolerant and drought resistant. With climate change, these grapes may become even more important over the years.
“We're going to get hotter, drier, more extreme weather conditions as climate change happens,” Marcus described while holding the still-growing grapes. “It's shaping and looking good, looks happy and healthy.”
Marcus runs , located at Davis’ northern border, with his wife, Jenny Meadows-Smith, who earned her winemaking certificate from the ɫɫ Continuing and Professional Education.
Since its first planting in 2014 — and first bottles hit the market in 2018 — Great Bear has won multiple gold medals at the prestigious San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition and several of its wine varietals scored over 90 points by Wine Enthusiast Magazine.
A new wine country
The vineyard’s success challenges the notion that wine fit for a connoisseur’s discerning palette can’t be found outside Napa County. Instead, this vineyard thrives in the heart of Yolo County.
The Meadows-Smiths said they see their boutique vineyard as “a mix between an English pub and a French bistro, but with world-class wines” in a casual setting.
After years in England, Marcus' original impetus to move to California was to manage an agricultural startup that produced biopesticides that helped “reduce the chemical load” in conventional agriculture. That company was eventually acquired by Bayer.
A trained synthetic chemist, Jenny transitioned into marketing chemical information for the Royal Society of Chemistry. But chemistry is not biology, and when she decided to earn her winemaking certificate, she said she encountered a steep learning curve.
“We didn't know anything about wine,” Jenny said, laughing at the memory. “I had to learn the microbiology of fermentation, some biochemistry, and, obviously, the wine science — how to grow grapes, how to bottle — we had to learn all of that from scratch.”
She worked on the vineyards at the in Napa Valley with Mike Anderson, the station’s former manager, learning how to prune, inspect grapes and other fundamental skills. The Meadow-Smiths consulted Anderson at Great Bear’s infancy, in the hopes of producing grapes for exceptional wines.
“We actually asked him, ‘Is it worth our while? Can we make grapes as good as the ones you grow in Oakville?’” Jenny recalled. “He said, ‘If you take care and do the work, you can produce a decent grape’ — which is not what everyone said.”
Anderson was one of several viticulture instructors-turned-colleagues who helped Marcus and Jenny design Great Bear’s actual vineyards, identifying the right rootstock and winegrape varietals to grow based on the farm’s climate and soil conditions.
Though Great Bear Vineyard was launched just over a decade ago, the property itself has been a family farm since 1860. The couple purchased the property from the descendants of the farm’s original European settlers. Signs of the past are present, with many of the original structures still visible today. Great Bear has continued the ground’s family farm traditions, with the Meadows-Smiths assisted by their four children.
Planning for the future
Back in the vineyard, Marcus points at different aspects of the extended, elevated winegrape branches. The arms, or cordons, bearing the grapes are horizontally elevated a few feet above the ground, as the tops of the vines bushel and cast a dappled light on the grapes below.
“They cascade over, which means there's no direct sunlight on the grapes” which prevents a “raisining effect,” according to Marcus.
The open air underneath the cordons allows for the cool Sacramento Delta’s breeze to travel through their vineyards at night.
“For [several types of wine grapes], you need hot days, cool nights, which is what we get,” Marcus described.
Great Bear currently produces four white wines and eight reds. Its production is fewer than 100 barrels of wine (roughly 2,000 cases) with some wines produced in smaller batches of fewer than 100 cases per season.
Marcus points to a row of wine grapes called “errante noir.” The varietal was first developed in 2019 by Andrew Walker, professor emeritus of viticulture and enology, to be more climate tolerant and drought resistant. They are also resistant to Pierce’s disease, an insect-transmitted bacteria that causes grapes to wither and fall from the vine.
A leading geneticist, Walker has researched ways to combat powdery and Downy mildews, as well as Pierce’s disease, which unlike mildew, does “kills grapevines and kills them quickly [in] two to three years,” Walker said. This threat costs California grape growers millions annually in losses.
According to Walker, the potential of the varietals is still being studied.
“A lot of things have to be learned, but they're grown beautifully in vineyards around the state,” Walker said. “They're not on huge acreages yet, but there's no Pierce's. These are very targeted to certain spots.”
From large growers to small vineyards, like Great Bear, the new varietals fit into a larger holistic approach to farming. A portion of the vineyard is dedicated to organic practices, and the remainder follows sustainable grape protocols. The vineyard was rewarded for its efforts in 2023 with the International Sustainable Agriculture Award at the BioAg World Congress in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“Because we grow organically, we can't spray with synthetic pesticides,” Marcus explained. “We have to do what we can using nature in order to reduce disease pressure.”
And as Walker sees it, climate will continue to be a major issue for wineries across the globe.
“The climate is, without question, going to become more erratic,” Walker said. “[In California,] it has to do with the duration of those heat spikes. At any rate, we should be preparing for it and thinking about how to address it best.”