Vivai Cooperativi Rauscedo - VCR

VCR produces 80-100 million grafted grapevines a year. To put that in perspective, all the nurseries in NZ combined produce maybe 5% of that in a good year. VCR is not just a powerhouse in the production of grafted vines, but also in the research and innovation space: this gives them global reach and resilience. Breeding disease resistant varieties is one of their main research focuses, and over the last few decades their team has produced many of the exciting new varieties on the market today (including all the ones I tried at @trezerowine )

I was honored to be given a tour of the nursery and research facilities and the opportunity to try trial wines from resistant varieties. I was thrilled with the flavor profile of Soreli, which was bright, tropical, and citrus. A blending partner made in heaven (aka Italy) for NZ Sauvignon blanc, or easily a standalone varietal wine! Kersus and Voltutnis were also of particular interest, keeping in mind that all these trial wines are like raw materials without the artistic flair of commercial wines.

The first photo is the tissue culture (TC) laboratory which is how vines can be "cleaned" of viruses. TC is an important part of the breeding process to establish clean progeny for germplasm collections, or for when countries with extremely rigorous import health standards (it's us, NZ) require material free of diseases that are otherwise endemic in the rest of the world. Researchers, including at VCR, are always trying to improve TC methods for virus cleaning to improve success rates and reduce time (6-8 months to clean for "standard" apical meristem TC). Other methods include thermotherapy and somatic embryogenesis.

Last photo is the germplasm collection (vine library) in an insect proof house.

Grazie Luigi and the VCR team for an illuminating day