Meeting the Moment

With “national” being the operative word, members of the National Grape Research Alliance and I found ourselves in locations across the country this month, all in the pursuit of driving grape research.

In early May, I attended the Congressional Fly-In put on by WineAmerica, a founding NGRA member-organization. The event annually gathers wine industry members from regions coast to coast for meetings (more than 80 this year!) with Congressional leaders to discuss legislative priorities for wine. I was pleased to add to their itinerary a meeting with leaders across USDA’s Research, Education and Economics (REE) Mission Area, including Acting Deputy Under Secretary Spiro Stefanou and Director of the Office of the Chief Scientist Deirdre Chester, plus the Administrators (some in newly appointed Acting capacities) of the Agricultural Research Service, Economic Research Service, National Agricultural Statistics Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Meetings like this are vitally important, as funding and staffing for research at USDA and other federal agencies have never felt more tenuous. We shared our concerns about the grape research that’s at stake and they were exceedingly receptive—and grateful for the engagement.

This week, NGRA held our Midyear Board of Directors Meeting at the Cornell Lake Erie Research and Extension Lab (CLEREL) in Portland, NY. Our meeting was immediately followed by the annual meeting, also hosted at CLEREL, of the NGRA-initiated, SCRI-funded HiRes Vineyard Nutrition project on which several NGRA members and I serve as industry advisors. We discussed the wealth of new knowledge in vineyard nutrition and variable rate vineyard nutrient management that has been gained over the course of this five-year project, and that will be the subject of an ASEV-NGRA symposium in June 2026. Stay tuned!

The back-to-back Board and project meeting put us in the heart of Concord and Niagara country for a few days. This slice of western New York along Lake Erie is home to Welch’s and the National Grape Co-operative of juice grape growers that owns this household brand and is a longstanding supporter of NGRA. Together with the HiRes team, NGRA Board Directors and I toured vineyards and met with growers. We learned about the contours and complexities of juice and wine grape production, and the priority need for more solutions to mechanize and automate vineyard management—especially urgent now, as the costs of operation go up and labor availability goes down.

As Chris Smart, Director of Cornell AgriTech, said in welcome remarks at the HiRes meeting, “There is a lot of anxiety to be shared, but I’ve never seen more innovative and entrepreneurial thinking.” Although she was speaking about her colleagues at Cornell, the words rang true for NGRA, too. Grape and wine industry headwinds and the worrisome situation at USDA were prominent topics of discussion at our Board meeting—as were NGRA strategies to meet the moment. We are more committed than ever to continuing to drive research to advance the industry, across all sectors and regions of the country. We will keep leveraging our national reach, engaged and active membership, and broad base of relationships to find solutions together.