Here is an article that appeared in the April 2023 issue of the Oregon Wine Press. The edited version, with more photos, is HERE

“We have so many Ph.D.s per acre of vineyard here working on vineyard problems, that it's just really awesome. I mean, you know, we're all over it.”

Dr. Alexander Levin’s enthusiastic words speak of the often unseen ways that academic researchers and Oregon’s wine growers have been “all over it” together in the state’s vineyards for many years.

The history of agricultural research in Oregon dates back to the land grant era of the 19th century. Oregon State University’s Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center (SOREC), in Central Point, began in 1994 with the merging of the Southern Oregon Experiment Station and the Jackson County Extension Service. Dr. Levin has served since 2016 as an associate professor at SOREC, which is one of 14 such agricultural experiment stations run by OSU. In March, he takes over as the Center’s director.

A Michigan native, Levin, 37, grew up in a suburb of Detroit. A son of parents who had immigrated from large European cities, agriculture was not a part of the family’s history.

His first exposure to the wine industry came as a server in a fine-dining restaurant while studying psychology at the University of Michigan. Realizing that tips increased when his customers drank more wine, he was motivated to learn more about it. The restaurant’s sommelier took Levin under his wing. He even arranged some meet-and-greets with winemakers in the Napa valley when Levin vacationed in San Francisco.

Those connections enticed him to move to northern California where he worked several harvests, poured wine in a tasting room and attended viticulture classes at the local community college. For a while, Levin thought of becoming a winemaker. But his new winemaking friends in Napa convinced him to focus on improving the industry’s understanding of vineyard practices. “That’s where we need to build knowledge,” he remembers them saying. “That pretty much sealed it for me.” He thought, “well actually, I don't want to be a winemaker. I want to be involved in the grape growing.”

That decision sent him back home to Michigan for an intense two years of full-time science classes at the university while pulling dinner shifts at his former restaurant job. He moved back in with his parents and renewed his earlier passion for the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines that he had laid aside during his psychology degree. After all that hard work, he went to graduate school at the University of California, Davis, earning a Ph.D. in horticulture and agronomy. His appointment to SOREC came immediately after.

Water and effective irrigation are the areas of Dr. Levin’s research specialty. Southern Oregon is generally warmer and dryer than the wine-growing regions in the northern parts of the state, and vineyard irrigation is more common there. Drought, changes in climate and the region’s aging water infrastructure all contribute to water scarcity and the need to use it wisely.

“In the spring … after the snow melts… we have our peak… like a giant bucket, or five giant buckets or whatever, and that's the water for the year,” Levin said. “And, for the past several years, that has been woefully short of normal.”

Through vineyard experimentation, Levin seeks to understand how to optimize irrigation practices with the goals of not only conserving water but improving the quality of the grapes - all while preserving the crop yield and its profitability. A certain amount of water stress, at the right time in the growing season, can serve all these objectives.

The Station’s findings are shared with the industry through presentations at conferences and meetings and through vineyard visits. “We can tell them what might happen if they were to do one thing versus another,” he said. “To have that as a resource for the industry, whether it's myself or whether it's our pathologists, or our agronomist, or our entomologist here is just really, really critical, I think, to the past growth and success and the continued growth and success of the industry.”

Levin points to the collaborative nature of SOREC - and the larger academic structure in which it exists - as among the most gratifying aspects of his work. Having colleagues available with a variety of scientific specialties strengthens the work of the ten faculty and seven support staff at the Station.

Current areas of focus include not only irrigation water management but grapevine viruses, especially red blotch virus, and the effects of wildfire smoke on vineyards. Future research topics include vineyard practices with the potential for carbon sequestration and ways to reduce the need for labor - another increasingly scarce resource for grape growers.

SOREC’s work is supported, in part, by the Oregon Wine Board, American Vineyard Foundation, and the Oregon Department of Agriculture. “We're really here to provide education and outreach to the industry and to provide information to them in terms of how to solve problems,” Levin said.

To learn more about Dr. Levin and watch a video about his work at SOREC, visit:

https://owri.oregonstate.edu/users/alexander-levin