Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series
Cornelius Ough
RESEARCHES OF AN ENOLOGIST UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS, 1950-1990
With an Introduction by A. Dinsmoor Webb
An Interview Conducted by Ruth Teiser in 1989, 1990
Copyright ~ 1990 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a modern research technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous conversation. The taped record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed in final form, indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.
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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the University of California and Cornelius Ough dated June 27, 1990. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Cornelius Ough requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Cornelius Ough, "Researches of an Eno1ogist, University of California, Davis, 1950-1990," an oral history conducted in 1989, 1990 by Ruth Teiser, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1990.
Copy no. cataloging Information
OUGH, Cornelius S. (b. 1925) Enologist, University of California, Davis Researches of an Enologist, University of California, Davis, 1950 1990, 1990, 66 pp.
Experiments as winemaker and specialist at University of California, Davis, 1953-1972: red wine technology, controlled fermentation, flor sherry, dissolved oxygen determination, sorbic acid, pesticides, rootstocks, mechanical harvesting, histamines in wines, browning studies, diethyl dicarbonate, metals in wines, and sulfur dioxide; teaching and writing about wine analysis; directing graduate student research; work on clones, genetic engineering, urethane, yeasts; advances in equipment; chairman of Department of viticulture and Enology, 1981-1987; work in Israel, Brazil, South Africa, Australia.
Introduction by A. Dinsmoor Webb, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Department of viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis.
Interviewed in 1989 by Ruth Teiser for the Wine Spectator California Winemen Series. The Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. TABLE OF CONTENTS - Cornelius Ough
PREFACE i
INTRODUCTION, by A. Dinsmoor Webb v
INTERVIEW HISTORY vi
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY vii
YOUTH AND EDUCATION 1
CAREER BEGINNINGS, 1925-1950 3 Dr. Amerine's Technician, 1951-1953 3 Army Service, 1951-1953 4 UC Davis Winemaker, 1953-1957 5
EXPERIMENTS AS WINEMAKER AND SPECIALIST, 1957-1972 7 Red Wine Technology 7 Controlled Fermentation 8 Teaching and Writing About Wine Analysis 10 F10r Sherry 11 Dissolved Oxygen Determination 13 Sorbic Acid 13 Pesticides 14 Wine Color 15 More on Controlled Fermentation 16 Rootstocks 17 Mechanical Harvesting 18 Histamine in Wine 19 Esters 19 Browning Studies 20 Diethy1 Dicarbonate and Dimethy1dicarbonate 21 Mold and Rot 22 Metals and Other Constituents 23 Red Wine Headaches 24 Sulfur Dioxide 26 Watering of Grape Juice 28
TRAINING WINE MEN 31
TEACHING AND DIRECTING GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH, SINCE 1972 34
CHAIRMAN, DEPARTMENT OF VITICULTURE AND ENOLOGY, 1981-1987 36 EXPERIMENTS, CONTINUED: RECENT YEARS 39 Clonal Work 39 Department Work on Genetic Engineering 40 Urethane Research 42 Yeast and Nitrogen 43 Laboratory Equipment Improvements 44 More on Urethane Research 46
WORK ABROAD SINCE 1965 49 In Israel 49 In Brazil 51 In South Africa 51
WINE INDUSTRY ORGANIZATIONS 54 Wine Institute Technical Advisory Committee 54 American Society for Viticulture and Enology 55
WARNINGS ON LABELS 57
JUDGING AT TASTINGS 59
ROOTSTOCKS AND PHYLLOXERA 60
ONGOING WORK 63
TAPE GUIDE 64
APPENDIX I -- Curriculum Vitae 65
APPENDIX II -- Bibliography of published works 69
INDEX 81 i
PREFACE
The California wine industry oral history series, a project of the Regional Oral History Office, was initiated in 1969 through the action and with the financing of the Wine Advisory Board, a state marketing order organization which ceased operation in 1975. In 1983 it was reinstituted as The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series with donations from The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation. The selection of those to be interviewed is made by a committee consisting of James D. Hart, director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; John A. De Luca, president of the Wine Institute, the statewide winery organization; Maynard A. Amerine, Emeritus Professor of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis; the current chairman of the board of directors of the Wine Institute; Ruth Teiser, series project director; and Marvin R. Shanken, trustee of The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation.
The purpose of the series is to record and preserve information on California grape growing and wine making that has existed only in the memories of wine men. In some cases their recollections go back to the early years of this century, before Prohibition. These recollections are of particular value because the Prohibition period saw the disruption of not only the industry itself but also the orderly recording and preservation of records of its activities. Little has been written about the industry from late in the last century until Repeal. There is a real paucity of information on the Prohibition years (1920-1933), although some commercial wine making did continue under supervision of the Prohibition Department. The material in this series on that period, as well as the discussion of the remarkable development of the wine industry in subsequent years (as yet treated analytically in few writings) will be of aid to historians. Of particular value is the fact that frequently several individuals have discussed the same subjects and events or expressed opinions on the same ideas, each from his own point of view.
Research underlying the interviews has been conducted principally in the University libraries at Berkeley and Davis, the California State Library, and in the library of the Wine Institute, which has made its collection of in many cases unique materials readily available for the purpose. ii
The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons who have contributed significantly to recent California history. The office is headed by Willa K. Baum and is under the administrative supervision of James D. Hart, the director of The Bancroft Library.
Ruth Teiser Project Director The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series
June 1990 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley iii
CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY INTERVIEWS
Interviews Completed by 1990
Leon D. Adams, Revitalizing the California Wine Industry, 1974
Leon D. Adams, California Wine Industry Affairs: Recollections and Opinions, 1990
Maynard A. Amerine, The University of California and the State's Wine Industry, 1971
Maynard A. Amerine, Wine Bibliographies and Taste Perception Studies, 1988
Philo Biane, Wine Making in Southern California and Recollections of Fruit Industries. Inc., 1972
John B. Cella, The Cella Family in the California Wine Industry, 1986
Charles Crawford, Recollections of a Career with the Gallo Winery and the Development of the California Wine Industry. 1942-1989, 1990
Burke H. Critchfield, Carl F. Wente, and Andrew G. Frericks, The California Wine Industry During the Depression, 1972
William V. Cruess, A Half Century of Food and Wine Technology, 1967
Jack and Jamie Peterman Davies, Rebuilding Schramsberg: The Creation of a California Champagne House, 1990
William A. Dieppe, Almaden is My Life, 1985
Alfred Fromm, Marketing California Wine and Brandy, 1984
Louis Gomberg, Analytical Perspectives on the California Wine Industry, 1935 1990, 1990
Joseph E. Heitz, Creating a Winery in the Napa Valley, 1986
Maynard A. Joslyn, A Technologist Views the California Wine Industry, 1974
Amandus N. Kasimatis, A Career in California Viticulture, 1988
Morris Katz, Paul Masson Winery Operations and Management, 1944-1988, 1990
Legh F. Knowles, Jr., Beaulieu Vineyards from Family to Corporate Ownership, 1990
Horace O. Lanza and Harry Baccigaluppi, California Grape Products and Other Wine Enterprises, 1971
Louis M. Martini and Louis P. Martini, Wine Making in the Napa Valley, 1973
Louis P. Martini, A Family Winery and the California Wine Industry, 1984 iv
Eleanor McCrea, Stony Hill Vineyards: The Creation of a Napa Valley Estate Winery, 1990
Otto E. Meyer, California Premium Wines and Brandy, 1973
Norbert C. Mirassou and Edmund A. Mirassou, The Evolution of a Santa Clara Valley Winery, 1986
Peter Mondavi, Advances in Technology and Production at Charles Krug Winery, 1946-1988, 1990
Robert Mondavi, Creativity in the Wine Industry, 1985
Michael Moone, Management and Marketing at Beringer Vineyards and Wine World. Inc" 1990
Myron S. Nightingale, Making Wine in California. 1944-1987, 1988
Harold P. Olmo, Plant Genetics and New Grape Varieties, 1976
Cornelius Ough, Researches of an Enologist. University of California. Davis. 1950-1990, 1990
Antonio Perelli-Minetti, A Life in Wine Making, 1975
Louis A. Petri, The Petri Family in the Wine Industry, 1971
Jefferson E. Peyser, The Law and the California Wine Industry, 1974
Lucius Powers, The Fresno Area and the California Wine Industry, 1974
Victor Repetto and Sydney J. Block, Perspectives on California Wines, 1976
Edmund A. Rossi, Italian Swiss Colony and the Wine Industry, 1971
Edmund A, Rossi, Jr., Italian Swiss Colony. 1949-1989: Recollections of a Third-Generation California Winemaker, 1990
Arpaxat Setrakian, A. Setrakian. a Leader of the San Joaquin Valley Grape Industry, 1977
Elie Skofis, California Wine and Brandy Maker, 1988
Andre Tchelistcheff, Grapes. Wine, and Ecology, 1983
Brother Timothy, The Christian Brothers as Wine Makers, 1974
Ernest A. Wente, Wine Making in the Livermore Valley, 1971
Albert J. Winkler, Viticultural Research at UC Davis (1921-1971), 1973 f
I~ I v
INTRODUCTION --Cornelius Ough
Cornelius Ough is one of the few among those devoting their lives to the study of wines who was born and spent many of his early years in the beautiful North Coast wine country of California. Cornelius, "Corny" to his friends, recalls his youthful memories of trips from their home in Oakville to St. Helena for the purchase of the family dinner wine from the old Beringer winery. Local schooling was followed by the B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, which well qualified him for the position of assistant to Professor Amerine on the Enology staff at Davis in 1950. Having recently joined the Department as Assistant Professor of Enology, I met Cornelius first at this time and became much better acquainted on his return from military service in 1953.
Cornelius progressed rapidly up the ladder of positions in the Experiment Station, and was soon advanced to the specialist series, and later, on award of the D.Sci. degree from Stellenbosch University, to the full academic position of Professor. These advances reflected increasingly greater successful responses to challenges--first in the field of wine analyses, and later as a planner, team leader, and administrator. His distinguished leadership as Chairman of the Department of Viticulture and Enology from 1981 to 1987 speaks clearly of his accomplishments.
Cornelius is probably atypical of the majority of those recorded in the wine oral history program, in that his efforts have been not so much toward direct production problems of winemaking but more toward solution of related analytical, legal, and developmental problems. Lest these types of problems be considered of lesser importance, understand that they are likely critical to the future of the California grape and wine industry. I believe them so.
Davis, California A. Dinsmoor Webb 18 June 1990 Professor Emeritus of Enology vi
INTERVIEW HISTORY -- Cornelius S. Ough
Professor Cornelius S. Ough is one of the quiet contributors to the advance of the California wine industry. In addition to his research, he for six years headed the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California at Davis. For most of his career, working in his office and laboratory and at foreign institutions, he has solved technical problems on a level understood by mainly his fellow-enologists. Many of his solutions, however, have proved practical when carried into application in wineries and regulatory agencies. To give access to his work, he has constantly published technical papers. They and his books are listed in Appendix II. In this interview, the many significant applications of his researches were explored.
The first session of the interview was held on January 9, 1989, in the conference room of the Wine Institute. He had come to San Francisco to make some preparations for the sabbatical leave he was about to take. The second session was held in his office at Davis on November 10, 1989, after his return from that leave, most of which he had spent working in South Africa.
Because Professor Ough speaks precisely, few corrections were necessary in the transcript except to confirm technical terms unfamiliar to the transcriber and the editor--a task he attended to with the affable patience that clearly has marked his long career.
Ruth Teiser Interview-Editor
July 1990 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California at Berkeley Regional Oral History Office vii University of California" Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
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Your full name (Jo eN ~ LI' U. ~ S' +FV.!::..-l?tJ~O=--..::::...::u...=::.G....!..../~ _ ~ Date of birth :lezsr-s 1Jo-t\ 'f \q "Birthplace NkPfi) (!A r Father's full name-lhLVA BfNJ,.L-lA-c!....t.."f.:....L.!..L1,.N.l!..--'()~CA~G~+J_· _ Occupation M ec.hA-w \ <:- Birthplace_...::.Tt.:...... =...6....:...'YO-=---A _ Mother's full name---.RLUh h'ldlA-VYlOIJ€vj Du ~ /-J Occupation---±k>LlSe W'lfe . BirthPlace~=a'--~~'-It~r _
Your spouse MfrQ.+ht\- ~N N£ CR(). 6 ___-----A Present ~o~it~~&~V~~~)~~~.~~wl~i~f-·----~------~-- JJ L.LC, Education B,~, --J ~cl.:~ / ~().~ cr6R~ ,k. \.V (''V e..~ N~+R06 ~ii) (lllyy§f6-U.&& ~~~+W' Other interests or activities 1 YOUTH AND EDUCATION, 1925-1950 [Interview 1: 9 January 1989]1 Teiser: Let's begin at the beginning, when and where you were born. Ough: I was born in Napa on the 28th of July, 1925. Teiser: Did that predispose you towards an interest in wine? Ough: Not at all. No, I was going to be a forest ranger. After listening to a forest ranger speak, I decided there were too many veterans from World War II going into that area. I had a very good chemistry teacher, so I got interested in chemistry instead. Teiser: Before the war you had gone to high school and junior college, hadn't you? Ough: Yes, I went to Point Arena High School, and graduated from Placer High School, then went to Placer Junior College for two years. Teiser: Had your family moved to the Mother Lode then? Ough: Yes, they had moved to Colfax. Teiser: How did they happen to go to Colfax? Ough: Oh, my father was a mechanic. We used to live up in the coastal area, near where Gualala is, but my sister needed to get to a warmer climate. My mother believed Gualala was too isolated, so we moved to Colfax. My dad worked there as a mechanic. I went to Placer College and drove a school bus. Then for two years during World War II I worked as a truck driver for the army out 1This symbol (##) indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has begun or ended. For a guide to the tapes, see page 64. 2 of Sharp's General Depot. This was near Stockton. I drove to San Francisco to the piers and hauled freight. I was 4-F at the time--I had high blood pressure, which I still have. At that time they didn't know how to treat it as well as they do now. After that I went back to junior college at Auburn, and graduated from there in 1947. I went to [UC] Berkeley after that, and got a B. S. degree in chemistry there. Teiser: Was the chemistry teacher who interested you in the subject at junior college? Ough: Yes; he had taught at Berkeley. He had lung problems and had moved up to that area to get out of the Berkeley area. He was an excellent man. 3 CAREER BEGINNING Dr. Amerine's Technician. 1950-1951 Ough: At that time I started to look for a job. I didn't know what enology was, but there was a job posted for a lab technician for enology up at [the University of California at] Davis. Dr. [Maynard] Amerine was the one who wanted this technician. I talked with him, and he hired me. It was the best move I ever made! [laughs] Teiser: It sounds easy, but I'm sure it wasn't. Ough: It wasn't that hard. Teiser: Had you specialized in any branch of chemistry? Ough: No, it was just a B. S. in general chemistry. Teiser: Had you worked with anyone there in Berkeley with whom you kept up later? Ough: No. Teiser: You didn't know Dr. W. V. Cruess or any of those people? Ough: I didn't know anybody in the food science department at all. I didn't take courses there; I took straight chemistry and biochemistry. So when I got up to Davis, I didn't know what enology was. I asked Dr. Amerine, and he told me it was winemaking and fermentation. It sounded interesting to me at the time. 4 My only exposure to wine as a boy had been that my father and I used to go out to farm run by a Portuguese man in Napa to buy eggs. He made his own wine, Portuguese style, in the barrel with skins and all, and let it sit for a year. Then he'd start to use it. It was practically vinegar. As a young boy, that turned me off of wine. Young people are very sensitive to acid, anyhow, and it was very acid wine--terrible to drink. I used to have to drink it. I loved to go to the farm, but I hated to drink the wine. But in fact we'd drink it every time in a small glass. So I wasn't that interested in wine at the time, but I got the job and then got very interested in it. It's a good field. Teiser: You certainly landed in the right spot, with Dr. Amerine. Ough: Yes. I didn't know him from Adam at the time, but I was very impressed with him. Over the years I've been more impressed with him. He's really a remarkable individual. I worked very closely with him the whole time I was there, from 1950. I worked for a year for Dr. Amerine as his technician, and then I got drafted into the Korean war. Army Service. 1951-1953 Ough: I walked in feeling that I would surely be 4-F again. I was very relaxed, and the doctor who examined me said, "Oh, you've got a little bit of high blood pressure, but that's not the kind that's going to hurt you. So you're in." Like that. So I was in the army for two years. Because of my degree I got into a specialist group. In basic training I think there were about ten of us who got sent to Camp Gordon, Georgia, which had a Criminal Investigation Laboratory. We did forensic analysis; they needed people there for that. I spent the time there doing such things as blood stain typings and working with identification of marijuana seeds- the usual forensic work. It wasn't very interesting, really, compared to other things, but it was better than marching up the hills in Korea, I figured. So I didn't complain. The whole bunch of us never got any promotions other than PFC [Private First Class] because all the jobs we were filling called for officers. They couldn't find any qualified officers. They used 5 to try to talk us into going to officers' training school, but that meant an extra four years. They didn't talk one person into doing that. [laughs] That was two years, and then I came back to Davis. In the meantime I met my wife when I went to Atlanta for a training session in parasitology. She was working as a lab technician. We were married shortly after that. UG Davis Winemaker. 1953-1957 Ough: When I came back in 1953, Dr. Amerine had another technician at that time, but the job was open for the winemaker for the department. I assumed that job, and my sole instruction from Dr. Amerine at the time was, "Well, with the white grapes you take the juice off the skins, add some S02 and some yeast; and for the red grapes you leave them on the skins for a while." I'd seen it going on, and that's the way they were doing it. So I continued to do it, and I got interested in how it was done and everything. I guess I had an inquisitive mind, and I started to do my own experiments along the way. They turned out reasonably well. Over the years I came down and gave a few talks at the Wine Institute Technical Advisory Committee meetings. Then Bob [Robert] Mondavi offered me a job with [Charles] Krug [winery]. I told Dr. Amerine about the offer, and it looked like I was at a dead end at the University. He said not to be too hasty, that he had to go on a trip for a week or two, and not to make any decisions. He was going to go talk to Dr. [Albert J.] Winkler, the department chairman, and see what could be done for me. He did, and I waited about a week. The Mondavis kept after me; they wanted a decision. So I went and talked to Dr. Winkler, and he said it didn't look like there was much chance for me to be a specialist, and that probably I should go ahead and take the job. So I did, and the next day Dr. Amerine came back. He was unhappy. That night he called up the president of the University and got me a specialist appointment, and made Dr. Winkler come to my house and tell me that night. Teiser: What year was that? Ough: That was about 1957. 6 So it was settled. I called the Mondavis and explained to them, and they said it was okay and they were very understanding about it. So I was a specialist for a number of years at the University. 7 EXPERIMENTS AS WINEMAKER AND SPECIALIST, 1957-1972 Teiser: Let me take you back. You said that after you became winemaker you thought of some experiments to make, and made them. What sort of thinking were you doing? Were you solving problems that you encountered? Ough: Basically problem-solving type things, yes. I think probably one of the things I did that impressed Dr. Amerine the most, even though it didn't work very well, was silicon coating on the inside of bottles so you could shake down the champagne yeast better. It was something that had never been tried before, and it didn't actually work that well. But it was that type of ili~g. Red Wine Technology Ough: I changed the way we made the red wine at the department, and apparently it had an effect on the whole industry. It used to be that they'd leave the grapes and the skins together until they were dry. I didn't know any better, so I was pressing the juice off the skins earlier for the red wines. Teiser: Compare what they were doing to what you initiated. Ough: At the time, most of the red wine was made by leaving the skin contact until they were dry and then separating the juice from the skins. What I did was separate them earlier. It made a wine that matured quicker. Several of the professors picked up on this and thought that was a nice advantage. Teiser: Did it reduce the tannin? ------_.. _---- .-. ---- -. ---.._.-...._- 8 Ough: Yes. And I worked hard, I guess, and impressed him. I did other things--small things. It's hard to go back and remember all the little things you did. Once I was lecturer, a specialist, then I initiated a lot of experiments with Dr. Amerine. I could use his technician and do the analyses and things. Teiser: What do you have to do to achieve the rank of specialist? Ough: I've explained some of the things I did, like initiate experiments. You had to show initiative, and show ability to get the job done well. At that time we made in some years a thousand experimental bottles of wine. Dr. [Harold P.] Olmo was in the process of making lots of hybrid wines at that time. We were able to handle a lot of them by hard work and effort. I think the hard work, as much as anything else, impressed Dr. Amerine. I was willing to work and get the job done. Controlled Fermentation Ough: Dr. Amerine had obtained experimental controlled fermentation equipment. We were working jointly on experiments there in developing flor sherry. So there were a lot of experiments going on at that time, defining how wine should be made, really. Skin contact time--we did a lot of very critical experiments after we got the controlled fermentation equipment. Temperature fermentation on reds and whites--a lot of controlled experiments that gave the industry a lot of basic information to control wine composition and quality. Teiser: Was the industry asking for it, or were you--? Ough: They furnished the money for the controlled fermentation equipment. Teiser: Was that jacketed steel tanks? Ough: Yes. They were bought for the initial purpose of determining whether you could control the fermentation by pressure. The Germans had been touting this as how they made their natural sweet wines, by building the pressure up in the tank. This stopped the yeast fermentation and growth. But we showed that under California conditions it wasn't practical, and it saved the industry millions of dollars, really, just by the showing them they shouldn't do it. 9 Teiser: You wrote a paper on it. Ough: Yes, we wrote several papers on it. It was a joint work with Dr. Amerine at the time. There were all sorts of controlled experiments that we did.' Teiser: Was it a period in which the industry was going forward particularly? Ough: Yes, they were converting from dessert wines to table wines in that period of time, very rapidly. And a lot of them didn't have a great deal of knowledge about table wines, especially the [San Joaquin] Valley wineries, whose table wines then were just not the best quality. We were trying to upgrade the quality of all the wines, and table wines primarily. We were working to try to find what things affected the quality of the wine--co10r, aroma, taste. Teiser: You said this was a period when some of Dr. 01mo's new varieties were coming in. Ough: Yes, there were quite a few new varieties coming in at that time. Teiser: Did you do special experiments with them? Ough: We did some with Ca1zin, which was one of the poor ones, actually. We noted some of the better ones, I think. It had an influence on Ruby Cabernet being selected, and so on. But 01mo pretty much did those himself. He made the decisions himself on those; right or wrong, it was his decision on these hybrids. There was very little influence from us. Teiser: Was it later that you conducted experiments on Cabernet clones at Oakville? Ough: Oh, we're still working on those. Teiser: It was in 1957 that you became a specialist. Ough: Yes. Then in '72, I became an eno10gist, which is a faculty position. 'See also page 11, and Bibliography of writings by Cornelius Ough, Appendix I. 10 Teaching and Writing About Wine Analysis Teiser: Had you been teaching before that? Ough: I was teaching graduate students, but no formal teaching. At that point I did start to teach a class with Dr. Amerine on wine analysis. We developed the class that year, and then carried it on from then on, and I still teach it. Over the years we wrote a chapter for an encyclopedia that covered most of the methods, and then we wrote the book on wine analysis, and just recently we revised it again--it's just been published this last year, in '88. 1 Teiser: I see you were involved in a book that Dr. Cruess had started. Ough: Yes, The Technology of Winemaking. Teiser: That keeps coming out in new editions, doesn't it? Ough: Yes. I think it's changed now. The last edition--the fourth edition--was the last edition that will come out under Avi Publications. But Reinhold-Nostrom hopefully will be publishing it again, and I won't be involved in that. It will be Dr. Vernon W. Singleton, Dr. Linda Bisson, Dr. Roger Boulton, and Dr. Ralph Kunkee, I think. They are rewriting it, and it will be a complete new book. I have just completed a text, and it is at the publisher (Haworth Press). It is titled Winemaking Basics, and should be in print by mid-1990. Teiser: As I look at your bibliography, I see that you must have done a tremendous lot of research. Ough: As I say, we kept busy. Teiser: How did you keep your projects separate? Ough: Well, I have a folder for each one, and keep the folders separate. [laughter] No, there's not that many projects, really. A lot of them were relatively short term. In enology you can have a short term project and get a lot of information in a short time. This was an interesting era, I think. It's more that there were so many things that hadn't been done that I could lC. S. Ough and M. A. Amerine, Methods for Analysis of Wines and Musts, second edition (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1988). 11 see needed to be done, and they weren't that hard to do. Most of the experiments were relatively simple, direct experiments, like temperature of fermentation. You know, people talk about it, but nobody had done any critical experiments where they'd have water baths and ferment the wines at strict temperature variations to find out how the wines changed. Teiser: I guess the means hadn't been at hand for long, had they? Ough: No, probably not. And also gas chromatography had come along and we could do a lot of volatile analyses that hadn't been done before. As new equipment becomes available, it opens up new fields of research. Like now we can do things we couldn't do two years ago. To me these are tremendous things, that we can find answers to problems that we could never answer two or three years ago, just because equipment is here now and we can do it. A gas chromatograph allows detection of as many as 200-500 components in wine. I think this is partly why there are so many publications. It was in a time when there was a great evolution of equipment, and its application was appreciated. We had equipment that we could do these things with, they were there to do, and we did them. We purchased a gas chronomatograph/mass spectrograph, which allows us to measure compounds to one part in a billion. Sometimes the money to get the equipment was not easily available. Many times I took grant funds to do analyses that were rather routine and unrewarding in order to accumulate funds to buy the equipment that was needed for good wine research. Neither the University nor the wine industry contributed much for this equipment. The money came from private sectors wishing products to be tested or tried in winemaking. I never gave other than honest answers, and many times the money came as gifts with no formal contract. My word was the bond. Without this source of funds, my laboratory would never have been able to do the research that was done. Flor Sherry Teiser: I think you've written twice at least about flor sherry. 12 Ough: Yes. This was Dr. Amerine's project, really, to start with. He had the idea, which I think was an excellent idea--it made sense. Normally flor sherry grows on the surface of the wine, in the old conventional style, and it takes it years to impart all the flavors. The way people had tried to improve that was to use very large, flat tanks where you had a lot of surface area. Or they'd coat the yeast on wood chips and then trickle the wine over them. The Australians did that, and still do it. It's a secret, they think [said with a wink]. But Dr. Amerine's idea was why not just get the yeast growing in submerged culture? We had these controlled fermentation tanks which were ideal for this, so we started to do it and we were successful. We could make the wine in a very short time, impart all the flavors that the yeast would normally impart in their growth cycle on the surface. It couldn't impart the yeast autolysis flavors or the barrel flavors, but we could get the other flavor very successfully. Teiser: What came of it? Ough: Well, Gallo [winery] made millions of gallons of it, and I'm not sure that they don't still make a small amount. Phil [Philip] Posson at The Sierra Wine company was in the business of making it for years and years. The sherry market has declined now. Teiser: I seem to recall that it makes a superior sherry. Ough: Yes. I remember the Gallos came up and we had a tasting. Ernest and Julio came up to Davis, and we had the various sherry blends we'd made set out. They were very impressed, and went back and were making it in hundred-thousand-gallon tanks shortly after that. And a number of the wineries did produce it. Myron Nightingale was the first one to try it commercially. I remember I had a bottle of this from one of the first lots that he made, and I gave it back to him a few years ago at a celebration honoring him. Teiser: What did Gallo label its flor sherry? Ough: They didn't label it as flor sherry. They used it to blend with their regular baked sherry. It was in their cocktail sherry blend. That's the main use of it. Teiser: It's like the traditional Spanish method, isn't it? 13 Ough: Yes, most Spanish-type sherry has some flor sherry in it. Teiser: Were there other special wines or unusual wines that you worked with? Ough: [laughs] I don't know. It's more difficult for me to know what's most important than it is for you. Teiser: Anyone who wants to know what went on can look at the literature, but unless you explain what the practical results were, we don't know which had impact. Dissolved Oxygen Determination Ough: I've highlighted some of the ones that I thought were important. One of the things that we did early, about the same time as we did the flor sherry work, was dissolved oxygen determination. There was a meter that had come out that had been used in measuring blood oxygen (Clarke Oxygen Electrode). So we thought this might be applied to wine. 1111 Ough: So we did some work on it and found we could use it to measure dissolved oxygen of wine. One of the problems the wineries had over the years was oxidation of their wines. Through the development and use of this meter we were able to show them how they could go in their winery and determine where their oxidation problems were, and then they could prevent the oxidation. It turned out that things like centrifugal pumps were sucking a lot of air into the wines as they pumped them around. Wines that were held at cold storage, even though no oxidation occurred in cold storage, became supersaturated with oxygen. When they moved the wine out they oxidized. So it was a matter of application. It was very useful to the wineries to know how to minimize oxidation. Sorbic Acid Ough: And we were one of the first ones to talk about use of sorbic acid in wines, at least on a publication basis. John Ingraham, 14 who was a microbiologist in the department then, and I published a work on that. Sorbic acid has been used for many years in wines now. Teiser: Did that affect the way it has been used, then? Ough: I think so. We sort of set the tone for how it should be used. John Ingraham and I also worked on the wine fungicide diethyl pyrocarbonate--DEPC. The wineries picked this up for use immediately, and used it effectively for about eight or nine years. That's the one that makes ethyl carbamate, which is urethane, which is a carcinogen. The amount of ethyl carbamate formed by this additive was relatively small--one or two parts per billion--but it was banned for use by the FDA [Food andDrug Administration]because of the Delany Amendment. This part of the Food Law states that if you add anything to a food product and it causes a carcinogen to be formed, then it can't be added. Little did they know that many wines normally have a hundred or a thousand times more naturally in them. At the time we were looking at new wines which had very little or none, but later on-~ I'll get to that later. Teiser: You continued your studies of urethane, didn't you? Ough: Yes. Teiser: Are you still continuing? Ough: Yes. It's very big right now. 1 Pesticides Ough: And we were one of the first ones to look at the distribution of pesticides in wine, what happened when they fermented. We actually worked with the Enviromental Toxicology Department at Davis. We got together and fortified these wines with pesticides and then analyzed them to see where the pesticides went. Some of them disappeared completely, others went only into the distillate, others reacted with the yeast and precipitated out, and others ended up in the wine. But we determined what the fate of these pesticides were once they were in the juice. lSee also pages 21-22, 42, 44, 46. 15 Teiser: Did you ever take it back into the vineyard? Ough: No, but it would be in the vineyard. If it was there on the grapes, it would be in the juice. At the time we got very bitter condemnation from some of the people who had vineyards and from the wine industry--"Why are you doing this? It's just bad publicity for wine. II But later on the same people were patting us on the back for doing this and getting them off the hook later. This happens quite often. You know, you can't hide it under a rug; you've got to be honest with your research and put it out and tell the truth. Otherwise it comes back to haunt you. Teiser: Wasn't there a general controversy about the various benefits and ill effects of pesticides of various kinds? Ough: Yes, there still is. Recently, down in Delano, they're saying it's causing all these problems. There's no evidence that it does, but it's always a controversy anytime you have anything like this. Teiser: It seems to me that Dr. [Emil] Mrak used to speak up and say-- Ough: Yes, I know. I listened to him talk about this and say that it's really a small matter compared to other things that could cause you problems. He used to love to say that peanut butter could be potentially far more dangerous than any wines you'd drink, and you give gobs of it to children. Wine Color Ough: We did a lot of work on things such as seeing how light affected people's appreciation of wine. Under incandescent light, the wine looks a lot redder than if you're under florescent light, which makes wine look bluish. People actually have a preference for the more reddish wine, usua11y--a1though not always. Teiser: Didn't you have booths there at Davis with different colored lights in them? Did you work with those? Ough: We actually set up special lights to do this. Our routine tasting booths have a red light and a white light (an incandescent light), but no florescent. 16 More on Controlled Fermentation Ough: Even through 1965 and into 1966 we were still working with the controlled fermentation equipment and doing a lot of experiments there. Teiser: Did you stop that line of inquiry because you thought you had found out what was needed? Ough: Well, all we could do with that equipment, I think, we had done pretty well. It was pretty bulky equipment, it was out of date equipment, and it was difficult to work with. To put it together, we had a crane on the top that lifted off the lid; the lid weighed about five hundred pounds. It was one of the original penicillin-growing tanks that was used in the penicillin industry, and it wasn/t designed for what we were trying to do with it. It was designed for high pressure fermentation, and we were doing a lot of other things in it. Once we found that wasn/t a practical way to approach the problem of fermentation control, we went to temperature control and showed that that was the best way to approach it. If we wanted to measure the gas flows out, we had to use a monkey wrench about three feet long with a piece of pipe in the handle to tighten the bolts with. The head was slightly warped. It got to be too much, really. It just wasn/t very practical anymore. But we continued to do the work. We replaced the heavy equipment with some water baths. We could put two or three five gallon jugs in at a time in each bath. We had five different baths so we could maintain different temperatures,l Teiser: By that time had some of the wineries themselves picked up the research? Ough: Oh, yes. A lot of the wineries did a lot of good research. I would never say that we did everything at Davis--far from it. The Mondavis, for example, at Krug were doing a lot of research on blanketing with gas. They were the first ones to do it commercially, and they did a lot of work on that, and very good work. The Mondavis still do a lot of excellent research. Andre Tchelistcheff in this period of time was doing an awful lot of good research at Beaulieu Vineyard. He didn't say l See also pages 8-9. 17 too much about it, never published very much, but he was working on fermentation temperature also. He was influencing the quality of wines in Napa Valley quite a bit. Most of the winemakers in Napa Valley were intelligent people, and they could read just as well as we could. Maybe they did not publish research like we did, but they did a lot of similar work. Teiser: Was Gallo developing its labs then? Ough: Oh, yes. Of course, they never tell you all they're doing, ever, or very seldom. But they probably were ahead of the University in many, many aspects of research, undoubtedly. Because they had a lot more equipment than we ever did, and still do, in their laboratories. But they don't publish the results very often. Rootstocks Ough: We got interested in rootstocks and did quite a bit of work with them, and I still am working with rootstocks. Some people said it affected the quality of the wine and others said it didn't. It's still sort of an unanswered question, whether it does or doesn't. The rootstock depends a lot on the soil that it's growing in, and there are many aspects of it under investigation. But we did some of the original work that showed that over in Oakville, in our vineyard, you could find differences between the wines made from one rootstock compared to another. But then you start to look at the vigor of the rootstock and the whole thing gets very complicated, because rootstocks that grow very vigorously in deep soil are absolutely no different than weak rootstocks in rich soil. If you have shallow soil and a vigorous rootstock, you do get differences that you don't see in deep soil. Teiser: Did you do any experiments with vines on their own roots? Ough: Oh, yes, that too. As a matter of fact, we're just winding up an experiment on that now in the Central Coast area, with Jack Foott, the farm advisor down there. We've done five years of trials with two different varieties, eight different rootstocks, and own roots--looking for differences in wine quality, differences in composition of the grapes, and so on. 18 Teiser: Maybe you'll eventually settle the question of whether pre phylloxera wines were better? [laughs] Ough: I doubt it. It's only better in your memory. Everything is better when you're younger. Mechanical Harvesting Ough: We did a lot of work with skin extracts, mechanical harvesting. We got involved in that in 1969 and 1970, when mechanical harvesting was first starting to be used for harvesting grapes. We worked with the agricultural engineering department--Jack Coffelt--to develop equipment to simulate transport of grapes. Once the grapes are mechanically harvested and they are transported, they are in much different condition than grapes that are hand-picked. They are slushy, and they're getting vibrated. What Coffelt did was go out and ride the trucks with a device that would record the motion, and then he could translate that to a simulator. The device would shake the tanks and give the same motion as the grapes being transported in a truck. The effects of this transport on the quality of the wine that was produced, and the composition of the juice, was reported on. We were able to show that under normal conditions you might have a maximum of ten to twelve hours to get those grapes to the winery, if they were mechanically harvested, before adverse effects occurred. In contrast, even after twenty-four hours with hand-harvesting there was very little effect on the grapes. So we were able to get people, if they were going to harvest mechanically, to deliver the grapes more rapidly. Also to harvest at night when it was cooler, for the white grapes. Teiser: Did you do some experiments with that? Ough: Yes. Not actual field experiments, but we did the temperature experiments with the grapes in the container. We showed that when they are warm they deteriorate more quickly than when they're cool. It's logical, but we were able to show it dramatically. 19 Histamine in Wine Ough: We looked at some things like histamine in wine. Histamine is a compound that causes the surface blood vessels to dilate, and tends to put one into shock. There was a lot of commotion back in the '70s about this aspect of how if you had high histamine you were liable to get headaches and things like that. So we surveyed California wines and found out they didn't have very much histamine. 1 We could see no relationship with any treatments or anything; it was just something that was just there in small amounts, period. We did show that some of the Burgundy wines had very high levels of histamine, and still do, but other than that none of the rest of them had very much. Teiser: Was there any difference between red and white California wines? Ough: No. We were convinced from our own experiments that malolactic fermentations would not give any added histamine, although some of the Germans had been publishing that it did give exceedingly high levels. We couldn't find that with the normal flora that were used in our wines. We didn't ever publish it because there was such an overwhelming amount of literature from Germany saying that it did. We said we must be wrong and we backed off and didn't publish that particular part of it. But later on- actually just published last year--we did publish a paper that showed that, yes, it absolutely did not add to the histamine in the wine. They had some wrong data they were looking at; something was wrong with their experiments. We did show that you can grow the malolactics in grape juice and produce high amounts, but not in wine. Esters Ough: Then we looked at the esters in wines. We had a graduate student from Brazil who was interested in esters, so we developed methods to measure esters in wine. Teiser: What's the significance of esters in wine? lSee also pages 24-25. 20 Ough: They give the wine the fruitiness that you smell. The actual fruity smell in most wine is due to the esters that are present. We showed that different yeasts cause different amounts of esters and different kinds to be produced. Oxidated yeast, such as Pichia and those oxidative yeasts, will form ethyl acetate, which is a spoilage ester. Whereas Sacchromyces form the "good" esters, you might say. They don't form much ethyl acetate, but a lot of others that are very fruity. So we worked on that with the graduate student, Carlos Daudt. He came back later to get a PhD. and worked on volatile amines in wines. We applied the use of an ammonia electrode to measure ammonia in wines, and that's in use in the industry now. Browning Studies Ough: Early on, we had done some experiments with glucose oxidase enzyme which, along with catalase enzyme, will supposedly remove oxygen from wine. Our experiment showed that in all cases the oxygen was removed, because we could measure it with the oxygen electrode. But in some cases the wines actually got browner. We weren't quite sure why at the time, but later on we put a graduate student on this project. He was able to show that the catalase was inactivated by the alcohol that was present. It was necessary for the catalase to be active to remove the hydrogen peroxide that was formed from the glucose oxidase activity. Since it was inactivated, there was hydrogen peroxide left in wine and that caused browning of the wines. So we could explain why we had this result where the oxygen disappeared but the wines got browner. 1NI Teiser: Oxidation occurred during bottling also? Ough: Yes, it could occur during bottling as well. One of the things that the industry tries to do is limit the amount the oxygen that's in the bottle itself. I can't claim any credit for any research in this area. Professor [Harold W.] Berg probably did most of the research in that area in the department. 21 Diethyl Dicarbonate and Dimethyldicarbonate Ough: Another thing we worked with--once the diethyl dicarbonate, or DEDC, as it was called then, was banned from use--was dimethyl dicarbonate, a methyl analogue. It doesn't form the ethyl carbamate, the carcinogen, so theoretically that should be one that could be used in wine. We worked on that. The first paper we wrote on it was in 1975. Incidentally, it got approved for use in 1988; it took it thirteen years to get approved for use. It is as effective as DEPC was, without the danger. In the meantime we did a lot of work and published a lot of papers on it--methods of how to analyze for it, the amount of methanol that was produced, and so on. But the interesting part of why they chose the other compound I think probably reflects some of the thinking of people in these large companies. I had talked to the scientist in Germany who had developed these compounds. He said that the reason they chose the diethyl dicarbonate was that it didn't make any methanol. When it broke down during hydrolysis, it made ethanol and CO2 , which was ideal. But when it reacted with ammonia it made the ethyl carbamate, which is urethane, which is bad. But he said it made such a little amount, about a part per billion under normal use, that they thought nobody would ever see that. They thought nobody would ever come up with the fact that it did make it in wine. The dimethyldicarbonate made a measurable amount of methanol, which is a bad thing in wine--in Europe, especially. This was because of all the problems that arise from people using wood alcohol to make artificial wine or to fortify wines. We used it about seven or eight years before it got caught up with. It got caught up with because Swedish scientists did an improper experiment. A graduate student on a weekend did an experiment where the answers were off by a factor of a thousand, and he published it unknowingly. That caused the compound to be banned, and it caused the attention to be generated. Then the methods were improved. The one part per billion that was formed could be measured. Like I say, it took thirteen years to get the dimethyldicarbonate approved. I took two trips back to the FDA to explain everything that had been done, that I had done, and explained why the industry wanted to use it, and so on. Teiser: Do you encounter much poor research or published papers? 22 Ough: Well, this was published in Science, which is supposed to be a top-notch science journal. I refuted their data, and a good German scientist did also. By two different methods we refuted their data, and Science would never even publish an acknowledgment or a letter saying that it was wrong. They just stonewalled the whole thing. I published my paper in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, and they sent it to the Swedish scientist to review. In it I pointed out that it was careless or erroneous work, and he admitted that it was and asked that I please not mention his name. [laughs] So I deleted his name from it. Teiser: Once something gets into Science, it's likely to be permanent, isn't it? People might refer to it forever. Ough: Yes. And that compound will never be used again because of that, even though it's not that serious a factor in health. Mold and Rot Ough: We got involved also in mold and rot--I get involved in all the good things--trying to determine threshhold levels of mold tastes. It's always been a problem: wineries buy grapes, and they want to reject the grapes if they're moldy or rotted. It's very difficult to do this in a truly honest manner. You know, it's very subjective. Gallo, for example, has it written into their contracts that their winemakers will make that decision based on the appearance and odor of the grapes when they are delivered to the winery. They can reject them if they want to. Well, this is very subjective, and everybody wants to get something that's more objective to this decision. And I'm sure Gallo does, too. But it's very difficult. We've never come up with anything where you can take an analysis of the juice there and really make a decision whether there's some mold and rot in those grapes or not. Because it doesn't change things enough, or some things change and some things don't change. They've tried numerous different tests--antibody tests and things like that- for these molds and rots, and still have not been successful. Teiser: Don't they often check the grapes themselves before they go in? Ough: When they're mechanically harvested they're a slurry. You can look visually for the mold and rot in hand-harvested grapes, but 23 it's a very difficult thing to do in mechanically harvested grapes. Also they want a measurement that takes only around twelve to fifteen minutes. A truck comes in, it's sampled, and it's going to dump its grapes or it's going to leave, one of the two. It is in line, and you can't hold it up more than fifteen minutes. So it's not easy. We did some work on volatile amines in wine--not histamines but other amines. We determined that there were very few of them in wines. It was Carlos Daudt's Ph.D. thesis. We could isolate all these amines and show how much there was of them. They came mainly from the grapes. This had never been reported before. Metals and Other Constituents Ough: We also got to do a certain amount of--you can call it drudgery work, if you want, or routine work--where we looked at many of the metals in three hundred different California wines. This was supported by the Wine Institute. The Wine Institute has this program where they voluntarily try to control the composition that they think might be adverse, and this is agreed to by the BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms]. Sodium was a problem in wines--because wine itself naturally is very low in sodium, maybe ten milligrams per liter. This is sodium-free for all practical purposes. Some wineries were ion-exchanging and removing the potassium by adding sodium in its place for wine stability reasons. There were some people who didn't know how to do it properly and were just saturating the wine with sodium, going well above what ought to be a normal amount. When this started, Professor Berg was in charge of this program, and he did the analysis for several years. When he retired I picked it up and did it the last year, and also looked at the metal ions as well. The program has been very successful. Two years before he had done a survey and found, I think, only two or three wineries that still had above the three hundred milligrams per liter limit that had been arbitrarily set. Out of three hundred wines there wasn't one over the limit. So it was very gratifying. I think everybody concerned was pleased that wineries had voluntarily lowered it to a point that was acceptable to everybody. Teiser: Is ion exchange still used much? 24 Ough: Oh, yes. It's used primarily, I think, more for dessert wines than table wine, but some wineries still use it for table wines also. Cold stabilization is a better choice. As people get better temperature equipment, then they have the ability not to use ion exchange but to use temperature. But there are other uses for ion exchange as well as stabilization. Red Wine Headaches Ough: We looked at red wine headaches. That's an interesting one. That was done in 1983. We were interested in people who say they get headaches from drinking wine. A lot of people will tell you this, especially as they get older. We thought we would see how many there are, and see if we could tie down what's in wine that causes it. People have been saying for years that they got headaches because of the histamine in red wine. Histamine is a material that's in the cells of the body and can be released by things you're allergic to. Bee stings are an example: when the bee stings you, histamines are released in the body, causing an allergic reaction. These may cause you to go into shock. It causes the peripheral blood vessels to dilate, and then your heart beats faster, trying to keep the pressure up. This reaction comes mainly from allergies. The histamine is in the cells all the time, and the allergic reaction releases the histamines into the body to cause these reactions. It has to get into the blood stream before it can cause any problem. If you ingest histamine through your mouth and into your stomach, the body has excellent mechanisms to detoxify these histamines very, very rapidly in the body. If you happen to be taking a certain type of medicine, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, then oral ingestion can be a problem. Otherwise, the body handles it very easily. Some people have taken up to a gram of histamine orally with no problem. People have been talking about this for years--that when you drink wine with histamine in it, you get headaches because of the histamine. Well, it normally can't get into the bloodstream to get to your head, to start with. The only way it can get in there is if you happen to draw it into your lungs, where you can get a quick transfer into the blood stream. But that's not going to happen normally when you're drinking wine, unless you choke on it or something, and then the levels would be extremely low. 25 We wanted to try this a little further. We asked for people in the University who had headaches from red wine to respond to us. In the Cal Aggie paper at Davis we asked for volunteers. We got about a hundred people to volunteer who said they got these kinds of red wine headaches. First we sent them a survey sheet and asked them to fill out details. Those who said they got a headache from any alcohol consumed we deleted out of the program. Only those who said just red wine caused the problem we went around to and talked with in more detail. Finally we selected about fifty people to take part in the survey. We set up the experiments in our department and had a medical doctor there. We gave them measured amounts of red wine and asked them what their response was. This was around four o'clock in the afternoon, in a relatively empty-stomach situation for them. Some would say, "I think I'm getting a headache. I'm not quite sure; I feel a little funny." Well, you drink a large glass of wine on an empty stomach, you may feel funny [laughs]. None of them ever had anything that we really could call significant. We had one that we could give her anything, and she'd say, "Gee, I feel awful." She was just an over-reactor, you know. We went on and gave them some white wine that had food coloring in it, and then later we'd give them the same white wine with no food coloring: no significant difference between their verbal responses with either wine. We gave them antihistamine tablets that should prevent allergic reactions, or placebos. We did a double blind study on that: no significant difference between them. The only conclusion we could draw from this study was that this group of people did not react to wine in any sense to cause an allergic type reaction or histamine headaches of any sort. Our conclusion was that this older group could not handle toxic substances as well as younger people. If you eat a big, heavy meal and drink red with with it, the load of tannins--phenols- in the body can get to the point where it may be slightly toxic to you. We thought that was probably why these people reacted- or thought they reacted--to red wine with headaches. They may have gotten headaches, they may have gotten upset stomachs, their hearts may have beat faster, but it was probably due to the toxicity of the phenols. That's the only answer we could draw from the study. In the initial survey we did have two or three people who would hardly talk to us. They said, "All I have to do is take a ------~. ------~------~------ 26 few sips of wine and my head feels like it's going to burst." Those were probably really allergic people, but they wouldn't play the game at all; they didn't want to have anything to do with us [laughs]. There probably are people who are allergic, but these are very few. Teiser: I wonder if a comparable experiment might be done with diluted rum, or something that isn't the same composition as wine, and see if people don't get headaches from the same amount of alcohol in that. Ough: Oh, I'm sure they would. Of course, if you drink too much--we started by giving them two big glasses, and a few of them started to walk out a little bit tipsy, so we decided that was no good. We were giving them plenty, and if they were going to react, they would have reacted, and they didn't. Teiser: Wasn't the persistent rumor that red wine gave people headaches one of the things that increased the use of white wine? Ough: Yes, I think so. I myself used to be able to drink plenty of red wine with meals with no problems. Now, if I drink more than two glasses I do get the same symptoms that people report--a headache, upset stomach, pounding of the heart, and things like that. I can still drink a lot of white wine. I think it's the phenols in the wine. Sulfur Dioxide Ough: We also got involved in sulfur dioxide trials, when the business of all these allergies to sulfur dioxide was rampant a few years ago. We were asked to do some experiments with Dr. Ronald Simon down at Scripps Research Institute (Clinic) in San Diego. There was also another doctor involved (I forget his name; he's John De Luca's personal doctor, too). The industry was going to have to label wine, and they weren't sure whether it was going to be for free S02, which is the unbound S02, that's found to have acetaldehyde and other aldehydes or ketones in the wine. We generally make two measurements on the wine, one on the free and one on the total, which includes the bound. The limit that the FDA had set was ten parts per million. Well, if it was just for the free, many people knew they could have wine under ten parts per million and have good wine, but bound they couldn't. Because there's enough naturally bound in wine that almost every wine's 27 going to have at least ten parts per million, which was the limit they had set that you had to label with. So I went back to talk to the FDA, and I talked with the director of the FDA. I made my pitch for the industry, about how there was not evidence in the literature anyplace that the bound S02 has any effect on people; that it's only the free that caused problems. So if we were going to be limited by this, why not have the limit just for the free S02. Then some of the wineries could get under the ten par~per million and be happy. He said, "Are sure you know for a fact that there's no effect of bound S02?" I said no, but there was nothing in the literature that showed there was. So he said why didn't I find out. [laughs] So we did this experiment with Dr. R. Simon. All of his previous evidence was on free S02. He has a large contingency of people throughout the U. S. who are allergic to S02' He brings them in to Scripps Clinic and tests them. We made a chemically pure bound S02. It was available to put in grape juice. We had some grape juice that had absolutely no S02 in it. We packaged it and did a double blind study. We took it down to him and said, "Okay, mix this and this together and give it to your patients in this order." He did, and it turned out that about half the patients did react to the bound S02, and about half of them didn't. That was enough to convince the industry that they might as well bite the bullet and say, "Okay, we'll go with the label and that's all we can do." They didn't fight it, and they went with labeling. It probably hasn't hurt them one little bit. I think Dr. Simon learned a lot about this, too. Because you can develop a pretty good theory on what's going on with this. There is an enzyme in the body, sulfide oxydase, which reacts and destroys the sulfur dioxide--converts it to sulfate. That is present in humans; most everybody has a large amount of it. Every day you convert lots of sulfur dioxide to sulfate in the body. It's a normal way of removing this toxic substance from the body. People who are highly allergic and have lung dysfunction, such as asthma or emphysema, seem to have a lesser amount of the enzyme. So it gets into their blood via the lower gut. In their stomach it remains as a bound form, but when it gets to the intestines the pH is such that it's immediately freed. Teiser: So you found the mechanism. In response, did the wine industry find ways to lower the SO 21 28 Ough: They've made all efforts to lower it, yes. I've been following the average 802 levels in wine for a number of years. I started in 1966, I think, analyzing wines to see what the 80 was. It's dropped from an average of 150 or so to less than a hundred now, over that period of years. That's a big drop. It's an accident if the content of wine gets over the legal limit now. Nobody ever puts over two hundred any more if they're good winemakers. There are always a few who have a problem and add extra, but normally speaking the 802 levels are very much lower in wine than they used to be. And the legal limit is going to be lowered, too, in a short while. Teiser: Has there been research on any substitute for sulfur compounds? Ough: There's lots of research. In fact, there was a time (I don't know if it's still in effect) when the French government had offered a million francs to anybody who could offer a successful substitute for sulfur dioxide, but it was never given. [laughs] It's a remarkable substance in that it's an anti-oxident, and anti-microbial as well. It's not very good on inhibiting yeast, but it is very good on inhibiting bacterial growth. That's why it's primarily used--that and the anti-oxident effect on wines. It reacts with hydrogen peroxide to bind it up when it's formed in wines. It's very difficult to make good wine without it. You can make wine without it, but it's not very good, especially after a few months; it loses a lot of character. Watering of Grape Juice Ough: What about watering of grape juice? We had a graduate student working on a project for the industry. Well, let me go back and explain the situation. The state inspectors came around and looked at the wineries during their crush. This one state inspector came around to a winery, and they were putting water into their grapes. He (or she) was a young, new person, and said they couldn't do that; it was against the law. Well, the winery owner didn't think it was, and the winemaker didn't think it was, but he stopped doing it while the inspector was there, at least. But that sort of flared up and got to be a problem for the industry--is it or isn't it? The state law says you can only do what is normal, sound winery practice as far as adding water. Federal law says you can reduce the Brix of the juice to twenty-two Brix, if it's above 29 that, by the addition of water. They have two conflicting regulations here. So I was asked to do two things. One was to do a confidential survey of the industry to see how many people actually added water to reduce the sugar so you'd have less alcohol. The other was to find out why in some areas you got more alcohol with the same degree Brix on grapes. The coastal counties usually always got more alcohol for the same degree Brix on grapes. First I did the survey and went around and talked to approximately a hundred wineries. I'd say for the most part they were all very open and told me that yes, they added water. In fact, a few of them even mentioned that they added water to their wine, which I reminded them was highly illegal. Just a few of the wineries said that, and it was confidential; no one would ever know which ones did. It turned out that something like 44 percent of them said yes, they added water routinely to lower the grape juice to the point where they would be within the legal limit of the alcohol for table wine, which is fourteen percent. If they got over that, they got stuck with a dessert wine tax, and they didn't want that, so they'd lower the alcohol. In the coast counties you have to wait longer to get the acid down so that it makes a good, balanced wine, and the sugar goes up when you do that. So you're caught between a rock and a hard place. You either add water, or you have to add something to remove your acid, which is harder on the wine than adding water at that point. The way that turned out, it quietly went away. When that many people do it, it's sound commercial practice by anybody's standards. Then we worked for three years to find out why--it was not obvious--many of these coast county grapes obtained a higher percent alcohol than certain grapes. We had done some studies back in 1957, where a paper in Hilgardia showed this same effect. Our Davis vineyards always gave less percent alcohol per degree Brix than did our Oakville vineyards, but we never knew why. We had this graduate student doing this project. Two major factors [turned up]. One, when you have raisins in the grapes (overripe grapes start to shrivel and raisin), they're very tough and don't crush very easily, and the juice doesn't come out of them very easily when they are crushed. The ones that are crisp and firm split open and the juice comes out easier, and they're generally lower Brix. So you had this high degree sugar leaching out later, after you've taken your sample out of the fresh crushed grapes. After it's been in the tank for a couple of 30 hours, the Brix goes up because of the sugar content. That's one reason. The other reason, and the one that's probably more important, is if the juice is high in nitrogen, you grow a bigger yeast crop. You might not think the amount of yeast produced is important, but it will use up sugar for yeast cell material, leaving less for ethanol production. 31 TRAINING WINE MEN## Teiser: Over the years I suppose you've developed lots of relationships with wineries--just personal relationships. Ough: Oh, yes. I've had a lot of graduate students over the years who are out there in pretty prestigious positions nowadays--a lot of winemakers, and some of the winery owners' sons have gone through Davis, too, like the Wentes, Mondavis, and Martinis, to name a few. Teiser: Yes, that's a change, isn't it, now that you have former students in the industry? Ough: Yes. Well, there was Louis Martini, and some of the earlier ones, but there weren't nearly as many then as there are now. There are a lot of them who went through Davis out there now who are winemakers, and in a sense that makes life easier for us, in that they are fairly well trained, I think. While each winery has a different style, the basic training of the students is adequate so they can understand what they are doing and why they are doing it, and that's very important. Teiser: Do those former students come to you with problems? Ough: Occasionally, yes, but not too often. Most of the problems are relatively easily solved in the wineries nowadays. They pretty well know what they should do and shouldn't do. Teiser: The special courses that the University gives now, for the industry or anyone, are mostly pitched at newcomers, aren't they? Ough: Yes. Once in a while we give a refresher course, but for the most part they're for newcomers. It's very difficult, if a person hasn't been in the industry before, hasn't gone through Davis or Fresno. If they just come in with, say, a degree in ------~ ------ 32 chemistry from some place, they need a little back-up information, usually, before they can adequately do their job. So some of these courses are designed for that sort of thing. It's a general course in enology, really--bringing them up to date, taking it to a fairly high level, and topping it off with how S02 reacts in wine, what it reacts with, and things like that--stablization practices, hydrogen sulfide formation. All these things are touched on in these kinds of courses. Teiser: It must have been quite different--I suppose that when you were first in the department, all kinds of people came for short courses, didn't they? Ough: Yes, we had a lot of people. In fact, a lot of people who are now winemakers in the industry came, and a lot of the owners came in those days. There weren't that many wineries, you know. There were only about 120 wineries or so in the early days, in the '50s, so there weren't that many people. We'd have short courses of twenty or thirty people, and we'd give laboratories with it and have tastings and so forth. Now when we have a short course, two or three hundred people show up. It's full, and it's only lectures, no labs, because you can't give that many labs. So it's quite different. Teiser: We've just been interviewing Jack Davies--some people certainly started out boldly, didn't they? Ough: Yes. I remember Professor Berg and I went up to see Jack and his wife, when I think they'd had the wine down for only a year or two, to taste their wines and look at their stability problems. And did they have stability problems at that point! There was this wine that was just as cloudy as all get-out. It was in the bottle, and was a milky type precipitate, and there was no way they were going to get it out of the bottle. Neither one of them knew very much about winemaking, I don't think, to start with. I think they had read about winemaking, but that's about it. But they've made some extremely good wines. We had more time; until I started to teach I had a lot of free time, and the faculty used to visit the wineries often. Maybe one or two or three of us would go out and spend a day visiting wineries to find out what their problems were, and just general talking to them, interchanging information. I remember going into Beaulieu Vineyard one day with Professor Berg. Andre [Tchelistcheff] says, "Let's taste some wines." We said okay, we had an hour or two; so he pulled out 33 wines from as far back as '37. He had a whole series of Cabernets--everything he had bottled over the years. There were some really good Cabernets coming out of BV. We tasted those wines, and it was a real experience, something you'd never do now, because people can't save that much wine or take the time. A lot of that went on in those days. You tasted a lot of wines and talked to a lot of people. Teiser: What's happened to Cabernet since then, just in general? Ough: I don't think it's declined any. I think they still make some very good Cabernet out there. There's a lot of Cabernet growing on the wrong soil right now in the deep Napa Valley soils where it doesn't do very well; it doesn't mature properly there, and most of the people know it. But the market was such at the time when they planted it--there was a big market for Cabernet, and you could sell anything that had seventy-five percent Cabernet in it from Napa Valley. Now gradually it's going to be converted, I'm sure, and they'll be planting it where it grows better, in shallower, drier soils. Teiser: Maybe it's just nostalgia that makes me think-- Ough: Oh, you always remember that they tasted better. Everybody does that. I think it's probably because your taste buds were more acute when you're young, and your nose was more sensitive. I know I'm to the point now where I almost hate to taste because there's never the aroma there that I used to remember. So I have to work a lot harder to get an answer now than I used to. I think it's just because I'm less sensitive now, because the wines aren't any less good. 34 TEACHING AND DIRECTING GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH. SINCE 1972 Teiser: To go back to your teaching career, you said you started teaching- Ough: I can tell you exactly--it was in '72. I was teaching a course in wine and must analysis with Dr. Amerine. We joint-taught it for about three years, and then he retired and I kept it up. Teiser: What other courses have you taught? Ough: That's the main one I've taught, really. I've ta?ght a lot of short courses; I'm involved with a lot of those. But as far as formal courses, that's the main one that I've taught. I've organized seminar courses and that sort of thing, and brought in outside speakers. I've been mainly involved in research more than teaching. Teiser: The University has been flexible, hasn't it? Ough: Yes. You see, a junior appointment can vary. Mine was ten percent teaching and ninety percent research. The average is twenty-five percent teaching and seventy-five percent research. Teiser: How did yours happen to be that? Ough: That's just what they gave me. I guess they figured I was a better researcher than a teacher. Some of them have forty percent teaching and sixty percent research. A lot depends on what's available in the University at the time. There have been times when we've had to split people--take some percentage of time away from everybody to get somebody a faculty teaching position, because FTE [full time equivalent] wasn't available in teaching, but was with research. The dean has no problem with FTE in research. Teiser: The research has also involved students, has it not? 35 Ough: In a sense; in graduate research, yes. And I do a lot of that; I have a lot of students. Teiser: Isn't working with you on research pretty good experience for a graduate student? I should think he would gain a great deal. I Ough: Oh, hopefully he does, yes. Because we plan the experiments and he does them, and I critique as he goes along. It's all planned out, and if it doesn't work we have to figure out why. It's good experience, I think. Most of them haven't complained too much. Teiser: Do many of those, then, go out into the industry? Ough: Most of them do, yes. We have group teaching in Davis. Most of our enology master students are in the food science group. Then there are Ph.D. students in microbiology and in environmental chemistry. Most of my Ph.D. students are in environmental chemistry, and the others were master students in food science. I've had a few from the microbiology group, but not very many. I'm more chemistry oriented. Teiser: For someone like you is it more trouble to have a graduate student on a project than not sometimes? Ough: Sometimes. Sometimes they do a beautiful job with very little direction needed. Other times they do nothing right and you're working with them all the time. You know, you're trying to help them do it right, and there's always something going wrong. Some people have a knack in the lab, and some people don't. I've had a few that were just plain out-and-out klutzes. They could never really get an answer that they should have gotten. Even when you knew ahead of time what the answer ought to be, they couldn't get it. But that's rare. Teiser: Do you screen those out, or try to screen them out before you take them on? Ough: It's difficult to screen them out. Sometimes you can, and you do screen them out if you can. But you can't always do that. 36 CHAIRMAN, DEPARTMENT OF VITICULTURE AND ENOLOGY, 1981-1987 Teiser: When you became chairman of the department-- Ough: When I became king? [laughs] Teiser: That was in 1981. You followed Dr. [A. Dinsmoor] Webb? Ough: Yes. I was there as chairman for six months, and then I went on sabbatical for six months. Dr. [Walter M.] Kliewer was acting chair at that time. The chairman is a thankless job, as most everyone who's been chairman I'm sure has told you. It's not a fun job. There's never enough money to do what's necessary, the dean always gives with one hand and takes with the other, and it's a very frustrating position. There are no real decisions you can make; decisions are all up the line some place on everything. Your work is mainly administrative--signing papers, writing proposals that mayor may not get approved, and so on. Teiser: Well, you had a long sentence! Ough: Yes. I was happy to get out of it. I really was. It's a very frustrating job, especially if you're a person who likes to get answers and get things done in a hurry and move on to something else. It's not a fun job for somebody like that. Teiser: Did the department change during those years? Ough: Yes, we had a big turnover. Most of the older people retired in that period of time. Dr. Webb retired, and [Lloyd A.] Lider, James Cook, [Klayton E.] Nelson--in fact, most of the viticulturists, except for Kliewer, left in that period of time. So we hired most of the new viticulturists during that period. I think we hired one enologist in that period of time. Teiser: Were you involved in recruiting new people? 37 Ough: Yes, I was pretty much involved. As chairman you have to convince the dean that you need somebody, in the first place. If you just sit there, nothing happens. You lose that position and you never get it back, so you've got to fight for it. It's not automatic that you get a person replaced. You've got to justify it, and that's a lot of work to do it right. You get your justification, and then the procedures for getting people are time consuming. You have to interview, and get a committee together to look over these and select who's going to come in to give seminars, and so on. It takes a lot of time to do it right. Teiser: Does Davis have an easy time attracting people? Ough: I think so. Probably not as easy as Berkeley, but I think we do pretty well. Of course, we're sort of unique. We're the only one in the system that has the viticulture and enology, so in that sense we're unique. And we don't go out asking for viticulturists or enologists; we're out after plant physiologists or chemists or biochemists--somebody basically trained so they can bring in some expertise. We don't want an old viticulturist. We need some young person who can add something to the techniques and who has interest in the field. We got some pretty good people, I think. Teiser: I think there were fears in the early eighties that losing all those people you were going to have a drop in quality. Ough: We had a lot of problems with the industry thing. We weren't doing enough in viticulture because some of the older people had slacked off a little bit. They were close to retirement and they weren't doing very much any more. Few of the viticulture faculty were doing any laboratory work. There were a lot of long-term field studies underway that were not yielding any useful information. These ills have been pretty well cured now. In fact, we've got to push these young people out, get them out to see what the vineyards are like, and they're starting to do that now. But it's difficult, you know. When you bring young people into a department and there's very little financial support for them, and the industry isn't going to give them very much money until they prove that they can do something. It's pretty difficult on them. They've got six years to get their tenure, and if they don't get a lot of good publications in that six years, they're not going to be kept. It's especially difficult in something like viticulture, which is a field-oriented crop. It takes five years to grow a plant up. If you plant an 38 experiment, you're not going to get anything out of it for five or six years, when you get a crop that's useful. So it's a very difficult problem for these young people--to get money to do the research and to convince the industry that they can do something, and convince their faculty peers that they have some scientific expertise. It's just not easy, so I feel for them. 39 EXPERIMENTS, CONTINUED: RECENT YEARS Clonal Work Teiser: I'd like to ask you about the Cabernet trials at Oakville. Ough: The clonal trials? It's not a big deal. There are clones planted up there. In fact, Kliewer has clones planted, and we had some clones planted up there. They're just to see how they react differently. We've made wine out of them for a number of years. We have some that are small-berried, and some that are larger-berried, and these make a difference in the color of the wine. Because the smaller the berry, the more skin pigment there is there and the more color you get to the wine, because there's less juice per skin. Outside of that, so far we haven't seen a lot of difference. But we're just now getting to the point where we can start to analyze the wines; they're mature vines now. We did have a Pinot noir experiment in Carneros Creek vineyard. When we finished we had about five years of crop data on that, and we were able to recommend a number of clones that were better than others. Clonal work has just recently become of interest to the industry. The reason is that only in the past ten or fifteen years have the industry winemakers started to travel, to go overseas and look at the other countries. We've been doing it all along on our sabbaticals, but they haven't. They've now begun to go to some place where they see a great big grapevine, and they say, "Oh, we've got to have that." It may be in an experimental vineyard, and they'll ask what the vine number is. They'll get the number, and they'll want to import it. They'll get it all imported, and it takes years to get it through index and everything else. They may find out eventually that it was one that was sent from Davis originally. Things always look better on the other side of the street, you know. The farther I h ~ 11 II 40 away you get from home, the more spectacular things that you see seem to you. So this has been one of our problems. There's been such a commotion over these clones in other countries, and half of them are just heat treated vines that have been sent over from here, or they've heat treated their own vines and they're now free of virus. Not to take anything away from the people in the industry, because I'm sure they will see or have seen some things that are better than what we have available now. 01mo did clonal selections very early. He developed the Chardonnays. The Chardonnays that were available before 01mo did his clone study had many shot berries. They had yields of about a quarter of a ton per acre. He did these clone studies and found ones that didn't have shot berries. That's why we have Chardonnay now in California. Before that there was none p1anted--1ess than fifty acres of Chardonnay. It was only because he did the clone study and got this good Chardonney selected that they have it now. The same thing may happen with Zinfande1. What they're looking for is a loose-clustered Zinfande1, because the Zinfande1 right now is very tight clustered and it rots very easily. If you do enough clone studies you may pick up one that has a loose cluster. If you walk in enough vineyards and look at enough vines, you may find one. If you find a natural loose-clustered Zinfande1, it's worth its weight in gold. Department Work on Genetic Engineering Teiser: Is genetic engineering going to change all this soon? Ough: I think so. We worked very hard to get a good genetic microbiologist in the department. We have one, Linda Bisson, a young person who is very bright and well trained. She did her post graduate work at Harvard, and she's an expert on Sachromyces cerevisiae. We were very lucky to get her. She knows how to do this kind of work and will do it as time goes on. Right now she's doing the necessary preparation--finding out where the genes are, cell mapping, and this sort of thing. It's not short term. This is the kind of thing that takes from ten to twenty years before you get anything, unless you're very lucky. It's the future of the industry as far as genetics development. 41 Yeast that metabolizes urea completely is a possible genetic development, for example. That's a very easy possibility, probably, to enhance the number of genes in there that make the enzymes. It's the kind of thing that they can do. And that's a possibility to help solve this ethyl carbamate problem. Flavor enhancement of wines is another possibility. There's no reason, once they figure out how to do it, to transfer the genes that are in the grape and give the flavor to the grape directly into the yeast itself and produce the flavors during the fermentation--I don't see why this can't be in the future. It's just a matter of time and the amount of money that is spent in that area. But once it's done, then you can have wines that have a high Zinfande1 flavor, if you want that, or a high whatever flavor, and it will be natural fermentation. Grape breeding is the same thing. Now they're beginning to transfer genes into the grapes. One of the things being tried is to protect them from phy110xera, or from nematodes, or some leaf disease. These are the kinds of things that the grape geneticists are working on, and if successful are a real boon to the industry. Teiser: Are they working on "direct producers"--is that the term? Ough: No, that's an old thing. Direct producers are crosses between vinifera and non-vinifera that produce grapes that are not as good as vinifera, but not as bad as the other species. They were originally developed to resist phy110xera. Teiser: I suppose there are other ways you can make grapes genetically resistant. Ough: Yes, I think so. It's just a matter of time to work that out. Right now they're working on diseases that attack the leaves of the grape. They're trying to find some toxin that the bugs won't like that they can breed into the grape--they can transfer that gene into the grape. II/I Teiser: It will be a wonderful new world. Ough: Yes, if it ever happens. And I think it's a matter of time and money. How fast it goes depends on how much money the industry is willing to put up for it. And there's a limited amount they 42 can put up, because there are other problems to face. But we have the people there who are working on it. You know, it's just like when I first came to work in Dr. Amerine's laboratory--we had a colorimeter and a pH meter, period. Now in the same laboratory I have an excellent spectraphotometer; a pH meter that's ten times more sensitive than the old one; a G.C./M.S. so that I can identify the compounds that we didn't even know existed in wine before, down to part per billion levels, and quantitate them at that level; an amino acid analyzer; an HPLC. We can do all these things so easily and more accurately now. It's a long time in my life, but in the period of science it's a very short time, and there's been a tremendous change. And I don't see why these changes won't continue and be rapid as new techniques are developed. Teiser: You've certainly seen a lot of progress so far. I can see why you would be optimistic. Ough: Oh, tremendous progress. I am very optimistic, and I know the caliber of the people working now is excellent. They are very sharp young people, and in general will solve a lot of problems for the industry and make a lot of progress. Urethane Research Teiser: Did you say that you have a specific project for your sabbatical in Australia and South Africa? Ough: I'm going to work on urethane. Yes, they're very interested in it down there. They're just getting started on it, and I'll be able to help them pretty much. When you go to the southern hemisphere for a sabbatical, you get two summers in one. So when I go down there I'll get to do twice as much in one year [laughs]--two fermentation seasons. It's nice to be able to do that, really. Also you get other peoples' ideas thrown in, too. Teiser: Is urethane a problem with them as much as it is with us? Ough: Oh, yes, it's a problem world-wide. In fact, some of the liqueurs made in Europe were astronomically high in ethyl carbamate--twenty or thirty milligrams parts per million instead of parts per billion. It was enough to immediately say you can't ship any more of that, and you have to change your practices. It 43 came from a different source from what it is in wine, but it was there. Teiser: So it's a valuable field to work in. Ough: Oh, I think the work I've done has been very rewarding to the industry. I think we've averted any real problems the industry might have. 1 Yeast and Nitrogen [Interview 2: 10 November 1989]## Teiser: We lost a portion of your last interview; it did not record. May I ask you to repeat: What was the importance of yeast? Ough: Yeast depends on the nitrogen source in the grapes to be able to reproduce itself and grow. The amount of yeast varies greatly with the amount of nitrogen in the various grapes. This in turn varies with the fertilizer added to the vineyard or whether they irrigate the vineyard. Nevertheless, the more nitrogen in the grapes, then the yeast grows to bigger numbers in the juice. In doing this they use the carbohydrates of the sugars for the main bulk of their weight. It's not nitrogen, but it's the main amount of the weight of the yeast. So the less nitrogen there is, the less carbohydrates are used, so the better the efficiency of the conversion of the carbohydrates into alcohol. When you have more nitrogen they make more yeast, and that can be significant in the amount of carbohydrates used for that purpose. Teiser: Did that study have any practical consequences? Ough: Practical in the sense that it tells the winery that if they have a lot of nitrogen in their grapes they're going to get less alcohol for the same tonnage of grapes. It also explains to them why they get high alcohol from some of their vineyards and not so 1See also page 41. 44 much alcohol in others from the same amount of sugar that's in the grapes. Teiser: Is it difficult to test for nitrogen? Ough: Not too difficult, no. Laboratory Equipment Improvements Teiser: One of the thinfs you mentioned earlier that I wanted to ask you to enlarge upon a little was the effect of better testing equipment--better equipment in general in the industry. That comes up in connection with this. Have they always been able to test for nitrogen? Ough: Yes, they could always make rough tests using fairly simple equipment, but as time goes on there's a tendency to get more elaborate equipment so you can test faster and more accurately. For example, different varieties of grapes have different makeup of amino acids, which are really the building blocks for protein and the main source of nitrogen. Some of them have a good complement of the ones they could easily ingest and grow on, and others have not so good complement; they grow slower on these and not as well. It's just like the advancement of science in anything: you need to find out more details. Then you can do a better job of fermenting the juice. Teiser: Has the improvement in equipment in genera1--say, since 1950, since you started here--had really significant effects? Ough: Oh, yes, no doubt about it. For our laboratory: when I came here, almost everything was done simply by chemical determination. Now we have instruments that are automated. Consequently, we can go to greater detail, get much more information in a very short time. Teiser: Is there still equipment that should be developed? Are there strong needs? lSee also page 40. 45 Ough: Always needs. There's always a want list that you have in the back of your mind for equipment that you'd like to have so you could take the next step forward in your research. While you do with what you have, you can always visualize that you could do a little better if you had a little more. It's a matter of money, always, to buy the equipment. It's not so much that the equipment isn't there; it's the money to buy it. Teiser: But the equipment exists? Ough: Oh, yes. Better mass spectrometers, for example. While there are ones on campus to use, it's awkward because you have to get in line to use them, and then you have to prepare your samples and it's not always easy have a fresh sample ready to go when your turn comes up. You need the equipment in your own lab to do the work properly. Teiser: Everybody says that the Gallo wine company has a fine laboratory. Does it have all the advanced equipment that exists? Ough: They have essentially the same equipment as we have right now. They have the same GC mass spec, table-top model, that I have in here. They have a different model of an amino acid analyzer than I have, but it's very similar; it accomplishes the same results. It's probably more expensive and probably runs, perhaps, a little more efficiently than ours does, but nevertheless it accomplishes the same thing. They're just one segment of the industry, but they're as well equipped as we are in the enology side. Perhaps not so in the viticulture side. They're one of the few who are. Teiser: Do most large wineries now have the same sort of equipment? Ough: Yes. The larger ones are starting to get the more elaborate equipment now. Teiser: What about the little ones? Do they use independent labs? Ough: Yes. There's a very good lab in St. Helena where people send their samples and can get ethyl carbamate analysis done now in the same way we do here, and things like that. 46 More on Urethane Research Teiser: Another thing that you discussed that was lost in the taping is more on your work on ethyl carbamate'·-is that the same as urethane? Ough: Yes, it is. Teiser: Could you discuss your work in that? Ough: That's something I've spent the last two years now working on. Prior to that, in 1972 or '73, I spent a year working on it from a different point of view. Ethyl carbamate is a carcinogen, and it's a natural product of any fermented beverage; it's always there to a certain extent, in olives, yogurt, bread, and in anything that's got a yeast fermentation or makes ethanol. We found that out many years ago--ten or twelve years ago or more. Originally it was thought to be there by the addition to the wine of diethyl dicarbonate, which was a fungicide. It did react with ammonia to give ethyl carbamate. There are small amounts of ammonia left in wine normally, and in wines that have been sweetened with concentrate there was a little bit more ammonia that came from the concentrate. It reacted with the diethyl dicarbonate to give small amounts. However, further work showed that ethyl carbamate could be found to develop in all fermented foods and beverages. There was a report that we gave that saki wine from Japan had considerably more urethane or ethyl carbamate in it than did normal wine. That was never followed up by anybody except the Japanese, who worried about it and did some studies which, it turned out later, were very helpful to our industry. Then nothing happened until recently in Canada, where they determined that some of the sherries and sweet wines had very high amounts of ethyl carbamate. So we started to work on that immediately, and determined that the source was probably urea, and that it would form from the reaction of ethanol and urea with heat. For the last two years we've been trying to determine exactly how to regulate urea production by yeast. We have found out that certain yeasts don't excrete very much urea. Urea is a breakdown product of arginine, as it's one of the amino acids in 'See also page 42. 47 the juice. As the yeasts metabolize the arginine, they produce ornithine, another amino acid, and urea. The urea normally is metabolized by the yeast into ammonia and carbon dioxide. But under special conditions the yeast will excrete the urea out into the medium, and if there's sufficient arginine still present in the medium, then it will not take that urea back in. It leaves it there, and it ends up in the wine. It can react with ethanol and end up with high levels of ethyl carbamate. That's basically the story on that. Teiser: And the practical consequences? Ough: Well, in Canada they have set limits on the ethyl carbamate that can be present in wine. So far the FDA and the BATF have not set limits. They're doing a very conscientious study of the carcinogicity of ethyl carbamate. There has been no good study done yet, and they're in the process of doing that. It should be through by 1990 or 1991. At that time they'll set limits. But they have imposed on the California wine industry--in fact on all the wine industry in the U.S.--to instigate research on this, and to monitor themselves and see what levels are actually present in the wines that they're selling. And they do this; the industry itself has been monitoring the amounts there, as well as the BATF monitors the commercial wines, as does the FDA. The research has been done primarily here at Davis, between myself and Linda Bisson, who is also working on it. There's some work in New York state going on on it, too. We have determined where it comes from, and we know that certain yeasts will not excrete urea, but we're in the process now of trying to figure out why some of them don't leave any urea behind and others do. We know that the high levels of arginine in the grape juice are harmful and cause more urea to be excreted. So we have a pretty good handle right now on how to control it. We know how fast it's formed. If you have a certain amount of urea at a certain ethanol concentration at a certain temperature, you're going to get a certain amount of ethyl carbamate at a given time. We know that temperature is very important in the development. We informed the wineries that they should keep their wines cool, which they try to do anyhow. It may corne to the point where someday, in the not-too-distant future, wine will be kept like beer is, under refrigeration as much as possible. This will hinder the formation of the ethyl 48 where it comes from. There are still a few odds and ends to wind up. While I was in Australia I also worked on it. I spent most of my time in those four months in Australia working on that problem with the microbiologist, Dr. Paul Henschke. We found out that we could actually control the amounts formed by aeration to stimulate the growth. So if we didn't have any air there we didn't get any formation of urea in the media, and if we had air there we got formation of it. That was a pretty important step in my estimation. Also we found that we could repress the formation of urea by the addition of ammonia, which tends to turn off the pathways into the yeast--they don't take in very much arginine. We've been working further on that here, and there are some chemicals that we may be able to add in the future if they're approved for use, which may possibly help on this problem also. But we don't know yet. Teiser: You're continuing right now? Ough: Oh, yes, that's in the process now. In fact, the fermentations are going on in here on those experiments to see if it will work. Teiser: You mentioned that diethyl dicarbonate was replaced-- Ough: It's been replaced by dimethyl dicarbonate. This reacts also with ammonia, the same as the other did, but it forms methyl carbamate, which is not a carcinogen. After ten years of trying to convince the FDA to approve this for use, finally last year (or early this year) it was approved for use and is available now if people want to use it as a fungicide. Teiser: Is the earlier diethyl carbonate still used at all? Ough: No, it's been banned since '72, I believe. 49 WORK ABROAD SINCE 1965 In Israel Teiser: You spoke earlier of your work in Israel. When was that done? Ough: Oh, gosh, the first time I was there was in 1965. Teiser: How did you happen to go to Israel in 1965? Ough: In 1965 the Israeli government asked the FAO--the agricultural branch of the United Nations--for a representative to come from Davis to help them set up their research facilities in the wine institute there. They have a wine institute there that's a little different from ours; it's a regulatory institute for export of wine, and it's also a research branch. Dr. Amerine thought I was qualified enough to do that at that time, so I went and spent eight months there. I took the farnily--my wife and two little gir1s--and we stayed in a very nice part of Tel Aviv. I commuted to Rehovat, which is where the wine institute is. I spent the eight months advising them, and advising the wineries about what they ought to do in the way of varieties, maturity studies--the whole gamut of grape and wine problems. In fact, I was very frustrated when I went back ten years later and they hadn't done a great deal of what I had advised them to do. That's the way things are, I suppose. I went back there in 1975 for two months to see if it was feasible for them to set up mechanical harvesting of grapes. I'd had some experience with that here, so I was asked to back there again for the FAO. I was unhappy because they hadn't done what they had promised they would. There was nothing I could do about it that time. But when on sabbatical leave in South Africa in '82, I came back by way of Israel to visit old friends and to give a few 50 talks. When I was there I met one of the government ministers of food, who was rather unhappy with the lack of success of the Israeli wine export business. It was mainly one winery, the biggest, that exported. It was a co-op, and they had been doing everything over the years that I had asked them not to do. The farmers ran the whole operation. They grew grapes in large volumes and low quality because it paid off to them better, the way they'd set their pay scales. They had the Golan Heights from Syria by then, and I convinced the minister that they ought to invest in a winery there. It was a very good wine area, and they ought to plant high class varieties. As well as that, they ought to invest in a good California-like quality winery and get a consultant to come over and get it started for them. He went along with it, and loaned the money to a kibbutz to do this. It was a very, very big kibbutz, actually. It had lots of other interests and lots of good people who knew how to manage businesses. They set the winery up, and they got Peter Stern, one of our former students, who is a consultant here in California, to help them run it. He went over there three or four times a year to make sure everything was running right, tasted the wine, and told them what they ought to do. In the meantime they had sent several people over here to get educated and return to the winery. In fact, one just went back--Tally Sendvoski. They've been very successful; they've won lots of international prizes, and they sell more wines in the United States than they can make. That was one of the things I told them: There are so many Jewish people in the United States who would buy Israeli wine if it tasted good. The Carmel winery had not been exporting good wine. Their labels would be upside down or crooked--just poorly designed labels and that sort of thing. This other winery did things right--first class--and they really grew. Teiser: One of the factors, as I recall, in the wine from Israel is that it's sweet, and I guess it's traditionally sweet. Ough: No, not all of it. Actually, they make standard table wine now, just like we do. They also make sweet wines. There are many people who have wine only on passover and such holidays, and also on Saturday night when they have their special meal. If they normally don't drink wine with meals, they have a small glass of sweet wine. That's sort of traditional. But there are a lot of people who are not that religious who drink good wine and like good wine, and that's the market that they were after. So the table wines are much like our table wines. 51 Teiser: That's an interesting story. Ough: I'm happy to see the success of it, because I knew it could go if they would do what I told them to. It's very gratifying to have somebody believe in you enough to invest quite a few millions of dollars into the project to get it going. And to have it be a big success made me happy. In Brazil Teiser: You spoke of your work in Brazil. Ough: I was in Brazil in '76. I had a student here, Carlos Daudt, who came and got a masters, and then came back and got a Ph.D. He wanted me to come and help them get started on wine research in their university down there where he worked. So I was down there for about two and a half months helping him get started. I just looked around the industry and really did the few little experiments I could do to get him started on doing some research. Since that time he became dean of the graduate school, and now he's back again as a professor down there in the department of food science. In fact, he wants me to come down again. ## Ough: He wanted me to come back and spend some time down there in '91, so I mayor may not. I don't know; it depends. I just got back from sabbatical; I can't leave again too soon. In South Africa Teiser: I know you've done extensive work at Ste11enbosch.' Ough: Yes, I spent quite a bit of time in Ste11enbosch, in South Africa. Teiser: How did you happen to go there? 'See also page 42. 52 Ough: Well, we had a student here, many years ago, who came and was happy here at Davis. He studied with Professor Berg, and got to know the rest of the faculty. When he got back, why, he convinced his boss that he ought to get the faculty to come and spend some sabbatical time down there. They were very generous in actually paying your way down and giving you living quarters and things like that. So it made it worthwhile from a financial point of view to go there on sabbatical. Then the University of Stellenbosch is right in the same town, and also the Viticulture and Enology Research Institute is there. Also there's a horiticultural research institute there. So almost everybody from the department, over the years, has gone down there for a sabbatical leave. I went twice, and was very happy with the treatment and also the facilities there. You could do research, and also the professor at Stellenbosch University who was in charge of the enology department and the one in charge of the viticulture department were students here at Davis. Teiser: Who were they? Ough: Joel Van Wyk, who was the enology one, and Chris Orfer, who was viticulture. Chris is retired now, but Joel Van Wyk is still active and chairman of the department. Teiser: What kind of problems did you study there? Ough: I studied maturity problems of the grapes and ethyl carbamate when I was there last time; I spent two months there on my last sabbatical there. General problems in enology, really--I spent ~ime interviewing and going out to the wineries and seeing what they were doing, and then doing some practical type experiments: color extraction, and almost anything that we could do down there to help them with their problems. This time I spent most of my time in the lab working on ethyl carbamate. I went through their commercial wines and found out how much urea they had in them. Also they had set up some experiments ahead of time, because the vintage was done when I got there, and I analyzed those also for urea. I found out they had about the same amount as our wines do. No surprises. Teiser: It's my impression (and it may be wrong) that they have a capability of growing a great many grapes. Ough: Oh, they have limited areas. The climate is much like California, and its areas are far more limited than the California areas. Their areas of grapes are along the coastal 53 plain and in a few interior valleys. After that the climate is too hostile. You can't grow them on the east coast; it's jung1e like. You can grow them, but they don't make good wine. And the interior is far too cold in the winter. Teiser: What is the market for their wines? Ough: There used to be a big market in Europe, especially England, for sherry, and they still have a big market in Germany. Norway buys wine from them. Probably other countries buy it bulk and rename it to skirt political problems. Teiser: I don't see any in England now. Ough: No, they ship very little now to England because of the boycotts. There used to be a little bit in the U.S., too, but not any more. Teiser: I think you have a degree from Stellenbosch. Ough: Yes, a Doctor of Science degree. It's an honorary degree, but it's based on two hundred publications or so [laughs]. They give those degrees to people who, in their minds, have accomplished something during their lifetime. They've given one to Dr. [Vernon L.] Singleton, also. Two people in Australia have them: Bryce Rankine and Chris Sommers. I'm on a board now to judge a German scientist, Dr. Rapp. I'm what is called his external examiner. You have to write up a list of your reprints and write something from them. I mean, it takes a little while to do, so it's a little more than saying, "Yes, I'll take it." You have to do something to get it. 54 WINE INDUSTRY ORGANIZATIONS Wine Institute Technical Advisory Committee Teiser: Would you discuss your work with the Wine Institute Technical Advisory Committee? This brings you back again to California. Ough: I've been either a consultant for the Technical Advisory Committee of the Wine Institute or been at their meetings, I think, since the mid-1950s. I had a very active test program early in my stay here, evaluating different materials: pectin enzymes, diethyl dicarbonate, ascorbic acid--a lot of things that have very practical influence on the industry: temperature of fermentation and all the variables you could imagine. I worked with Dr. Amerine on some of it, some with Professor Berg, and a lot of it by myself. In the days when the Wine Advisory Board was active, they had meetings four times a year and I often spoke at those as well. I was working on practical applications. Teiser: Did they underwrite these? Ough: Not all of them, no. Many of them were underwritten by the people who made the products, who wanted to sell them. They would furnish money to do the research, and I would evaluate and give my honest opinion to the industry on them. And I stress "honest," because you have to be honest in this business or you don't last very long. You can't say, "This is great stuff," and then have somebody in the industry go out and try to use it and it doesn't work. They'd say, "What's wrong with that guy?" The first time they'll forgive you; the second time they won't listen to you any more. So you have to be very honest. It's worked out very well over the years. Teiser: The Wine Advisory Board was discontinued. How now do you deal with the industry? 55 Ough: The Wine Advisory Board itself was an organization to draw money from the industry and use it for various purposes. The Wine Institute Technical Advisory Committee was a committee of the Wine Institute. It was advisory to the owners of the wineries that were the members. It's the one that handles the grievous problems--the technical problems of the industry. The ethyl carbamate committee is a special subcommittee, which I'm on now, that handles this special problem. There's another subcommittee on ethanol emissions from fermenting wines. I'm a member of the technical committee. The technical committee now only consists of ten or fifteen people. They're the top scientists in the industry. I'm the consultant from Davis, and there's also a consultant from Fresno State on this committee. American Society for Viticulture and Enology Teiser: Are you active in the American Society for Viticulture and Enology? Ough: I have been over the years. I've been through the offices.1 My activity at the present time has been limited to publication in their journal. I'm not a member of the board or anything any more. Past presidents try to step away; that's always been the policy. When you get through your tenure of office, you should let the next group of people do the best they can. You may not like what they do, but unless they ask you, you generally don't interfere. Teiser: Can you evaluate what that organization has done over the years? Ough: It's been extremely valuable, I think, to the industry, because it gives them a forum for technical papers to be given, it gives them a forum for new equipment to be shown and exhibits, and it has a journal which is a fairly prestigious journal in enology and viticulture. It's a good journal; it's effective. People from allover the world publish in it, so it's an international journal, really. I think they've done, over the years, a good job. They've contributed to the industry and to the University. Many people have contributed free time to this; we all have contributed over the years. I was treasurer for three years, and that's a time-consuming job, and no pay involved at all; they 1professor Ough was president in 1980-1981. 56 never have paid their officers anything except travel if people request it. They have, in the past few years, hired more people, so it's easier. But when I was president we had about 2,500 members in the society, and one full-time person who operated the journal and the administrative part of it. Now they have two people in administration and two people for the journal, and the membership is approximately the same number. So you can see that many of us contributed a lot in the old days to the actual operation. We did everything: got on the phone and called people, lined up the exhibits, made plans and arrangements for the meetings. We went out and found places where we were going to meet, we argued with the hotel people until we got the prices right, and everything like that. But it was very interesting; I enjoyed it immensely. We rewrote the bylaws while I was there. I lot of interesting things went on. 57 WARNINGS ON LABELS Teiser: You spoke earlier of California State Proposition 65, which requires warning labels on many products. I think that cuts across some of the things you/ve just discussed. Ough: Prop. 65 was, I think, very misleading when it was voted on by the public. It was supposed to be a clean water act; that/s what it was published as and talked about. It actually turned out that they weren't interested in water; they were interested in food. They want to keep all possible carcinogens out of food. While that's a noble enterprise, there's the practicality of it. It's different from the Food and Drug Administration laws of the federal government. They say you can regulate these things that are naturally present in food, but only to the point where it becomes an economic hazard to the companies. You can't just say, "In peanut butter we found some microtoxins , and you're going to have to quit making peanut butter unless you can get rid of all those things." Well, you can't do it. So what they do is set a regulation of a certain level for microtoxins, and peanut butter has a level of ten parts per billion of these toxins in there. People feed it to their kids and don't worry about it, but the toxins are there. The state law is being handled by administrators--set by administrative decree--and many of them just don/t understand what's going on. They have a science advisory committee, but they're pretty well overrun by the politicians on this, in my opinion, and forced to make decisions that are not necessarily in the best interest of the public or the people involved in the industry. It's more to suit what the politicians think ought to be done, in my humble opinion. [laughs] I'm not happy with them. Teiser: Is there anything to be done about it? 58 Ough: Not until people realize that the price of everything goes up when you do these things. You can argue against it, but it's very dangerous to argue against it. You can say, "A little bit of carcinogen isn't going to hurt you," and it really won't, but they turn the argument around and say you can't allow anything in there that could make problems. They want pure food, you know? 59 JUDGING AT TASTINGS Teiser: You have done work on criteria for qualifying people as judges in wine tastings. What do you think of the value of these tastings overall--these great contests that they have? Ough: As far as selecting judges, yes, you can pick out judges who are consistent, sensitive, and who know wine. You can find these judges by proper tests. But as far as the judging meaning very much--like in the Orange County tastings, or the Los Angeles County Fairs, or even now the Sacramento State Fair--you could probably use another set of judges and get another set of answers every time you did it. That's my opinion of it. 60 ROOTSTOCKS AND PHYLLOXERA Teiser: I know you continue to do rootstock experiments.' I see there's an article ("Rootstock Effects on Wine Grapes," by John H. Foott, Cornelius Ough, and James A. Wolpert) in California Agriculture, the July/August 1989 issue. Is it a serious threat of phy110xera that you're working against? Ough: Yes. I probably am not going to be very much involved in it. My main involvement in this was because there was nobody else in the department willing to do it. This particular experiment was with Jack Foott. But there is a real need. In the San Luis Obispo area and in the Monterey area, most of the grapevines are on their own roots, and phy110xera is slowly infesting the area. It's only a matter of time until the vines are going to start dying--rapid1y dying--down in that area. They have to know which are the proper rootstocks to use--which do the best in that area. IIfI Teiser: Have you made trials in Monterey County? Ough: These were in San Luis Obispo County, but they're very similar in climate and soils. There are other trials set up around the state now. I'm not necessarily involved with them. We have one trial in Oakville that we're winding up in a couple of years. There are new viticulturists in the department now who have all of a sudden become very interested in this subject and will probably proceed to follow it up over the years. There is a new strain of phy110xera in Napa Valley, and it's a very serious threat to the whole area. They call it "type B phy11oxera." The rootstock that all Napa Valley is planted on, 'See also pages 17-18. 61 which is A x R #1, is adequate for the old phylloxera that was there previously. But this new strain that has developed is more virulent, if you want to call it that, and will attack these roots. Teiser: As I remember, in the old strain the bug was wingless. Is this a winged form? Ough: No, it's just different in that it can attack the rootstock that's been used for years up there. It's a marginally resistant rootstock; it wasn't the best choice, in my opinion, but I had nothing to do with the selection of it, so I can't be too critical about it. The people who did it thought they were given the best rootstock available. You know, if you have a very resistant rootstock, it generally has some disadvantages: it may be hard to graft to; it may be, like St. George, very vigorous, which makes the plant grow a lot of vine and many less grapes sometimes. So it's generally a trade-off when you make a recommendation for rootstock. Teiser: Are there other approaches? Ough: There have been approaches. You can fumigate the vineyard area and plant your grapes, but eventually the other areas you move your tractor or your pickup through will pick up the larva on the wheels of the equipment and bring it in and deposit it in your vineyard. It's almost impossible to prevent this kind of spread, and it would probably be almost impossible to completely sterilize the vineyard, as well. There are probably phylloxera down deep where the sterilate doesn't get to. It's a very difficult problem for the industry. Teiser: It's expensive, isn't it, to replant? Ough: Oh, yes, very expensive. You shut down for three years, is essentially what you're doing, and four years in the coast counties, before you get a crop that's even a significant crop, and it isn't the best crop. It's five years, really, before you really get a crop that will make you some money. Teiser: Could you plant the rootstock itself in a tract and then T-bud or something like that? Ough: Oh, yes, that's done routinely. They do plant just the rootstock and let it grow up for a year, and then they bud on the upper part to it. That's standard practice. You can do it either way- or you can bench graft and plant the plants to start with. It 62 doesn't make any difference as far as time to maturity; it takes the same length of time. If it wasn't for the roots--if you just want to change variety--you can just cut the old variety off and put a new one on, and you've got a crop within the next year. That's okay, but when you have to take the roots out-- One thing you can do, if you want, is to plant a rootstock next to that plant, and not take the plant out. You can grow it up for a couple of years and then take the old one out, but I think it's very messy; it's hard to get the old one out because the roots are intertwined. It's not the way to do it. Teiser: There's no easy solution? Ough: No easy solution. 63 ONGOING WORK Ough: Recently in Australia, I set up for a people-to-people visit. I will probably go back in March and take a group of people down there to see the industry. That's not research, but it's good public relations for the University, I guess. Teiser: Back here, are you now doing some teaching? Ough: Yes, I'm teaching my class in wine analysis. Dr. Amerine and I finished rewriting our book [Methods for Analysis of Musts and Wines], and it's been published last year. I'm in the process of getting another book published now; it's at the printer. The title is Winemaking Basics. So I keep busy. Teiser: You enologists never finish a book, do you? You publish it and then you start updating it. Ough: That's right. That [points to shelf] is the last references for a revision for that analysis book that we just published. Up there is the original reprints that we garnered, and all those boxes are full of reprints. Teiser: The update material takes up one and a half shelves. Ough: Yes. Those are all reprints that we got since the book was originally published. I keep a running file of them, and keep filing them as I get them. It's the only way you can do it. If you don't, you can't just start it after five years or so and try to get everything out of the literature. It's impossible; you just don't have that kind of time, so you get it as you go and keep it up. Transcriber and final typist: Judy Smith 64 TAPE GUIDE -- Cornelius Ough Interview 1: 9 January 1989 1 tape I, side a 1 tape I, side b 13 tape 2, side a (side b not recorded) 20 tape 3, side a 31 tape 3, side b 41 Interview 2: 10 November 1989 43 tape 4, side a 43 tape 4, side b 51 tape 5, side a (side b not recorded) 60 65 APPENDIX I CURRICULUM VITAE Cornelius Steven Ough May 14,1990 Vital Statistics Born July 28, 1925, Napa, CA, U.S.A. Parents native born citizens of U.S.A Married--wife, Anne (deceased); daughters, Elizabeth, 30 and Francie, 27 Education Diploma Placer Union High School, Auburn, CA, June 1943 A.A. Sierra College (Auburn Junior College), Auburn, CA, June 1947 B.S. Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, CA, September 1949 M.S. Food Science, University of California, Davis, CA, September 1971 D.Sci. Agriculture, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, Dec. 1976 Armed Service 1951-53 United States Army - Served in Criminal Investigation Laboratory as a chemist. Honorable discharge. Employment 1950 Department of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis, Present California Present Position 1972 Professor of Enology and Enologist in the Experiment Station Present Duties Research into methods of wine and must analysis, investigations into the effect of rootstock, crop level and maturity on wine quality, investigations into the effect of fermentation variables on wine quality and the development of yeast and bacteria inhibitors for stabilization of bottled wine, special interests in nitrogen compounds in grapes and wines. Developed and taught a course in wine and must analysis and assist in several other courses. Responsible for guiding the research projects of a number of graduate students. 66 c. S. Ough 2 Curriculum Vitae May 14,1990 University Service Served on many University, College and Department Committees. Adviser and Chair for undergraduate major and graduate groups. Chairman of the Department of Viticulture and Enology, 1981-1987. Special Assignments FAO expert to Israel for 8 months in 1964 to help develop an experimental winery and research program and to advise wineries. Many lectures given and several published. FAO consultant to Brazil for FAO to establish research program in enology at Federal University in Santa Maria, two months in 1975. FAO consultant to Israel for 2-1/2 months to advise on mechanical harvesting of grapes for wine. Professional Societies Member of the American Chemical Society; The American Society for Enology and Viticulture; Australian Society of Viticulture and Enology; South African Society of Enology and Viticulture; Sigma Xi; Phi Kappa Phi (honor society); New York Academy of Sciences; and Fellow in the American Institute for Chemists. Activities for the American Society of Enology and Viticulture include five years as a member on the Technical Projects Committee, three years on the Board of Directors, two years as Secretary-Treasurer, first and second Vice President, one year as President, and Program Chairman for one Annual Meeting. Member of the International Liaison Committee. Reviewer and abstractor for the '.&a.&TJlerican Journal of Enology and Viticulture. Reviewer for the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, European Journal of Biochemistry, Journal of American Official Analytical Chemists, South African Journal of Viticulture and Enology, and Journal of Science Technology. 67 c. S. Ough 3 Curriculum Vitae May 14,1990 Publications Over 200 articles in scientific journals have been published since 1957. In addition, a text, Wine and Must Analysis by M. A. Amerine and C. S. Ough has been published by Wiley & Sons Publishing Co., N.Y., 1974, and translated into Spanish and published in Spain (Analisis de Vin y Mostos), Scribia, Zaragoza. Coauthored the new edition of Technology of Winemaking, Avi Publishing Co., 1980; another text, Methods for Analysis of Musts and Wines, Wiley, 1980, Second Edition 1988 (Ough and Amerine); and two chapters for Food Additives, published by Dekker; two chapters in Plant Analysis (1988). Public Lectures Since 1969 over 140 public lectures or papers at professional meetings have been presented. Industry Related Activities At the present time and for the last 11 years have been an active consultant of the Wine Institute Technical Committee, two years as a consultant for the Non Beverage Wine Products Division, and served two years as a member of the Scholarship Committee. Recently a consultant to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, IRS, Treasure Island, CA, a consultant to PEPSICO in New York, a consultant to Owens-Illinois, Toledo, Ohio. Leader of the People to People, Viticulture and Enology Delegation to the Republic of South Africa, April-May 1985 and to Australia and New Zealand March-April 1989. Served as a consultant to FDA for the Wine Institute and for the Mobay Corporation. I have instigated several industry pilot-plant trials and demonstrations which have been important in changes of the practices of the California wine industry. (Flor sherry-submerged culture, diethylpyrocarbonate sterilization of wines, early pressing of wines to allow for early maturity, use of fumaric acid as an acidulant, etc.) Served as a judge at both state and county wine judgings and prepared a number of papers on the subject. Helped set-up judges' screening tests. 68 c. S. Ough 4 Curriculum Vitae May 14,1990 Industa Related Activities (continued) Spent two 6-month and a 2-month sabbatical leaves at the Stellenbosch Farmers Winery in South Africa studying their methods and advising on some problems and conducting research at the Oenology and Viticulture Research Institute in Stellenbosch. Spent a 4-month sabbatical in Australia (Wine Research Institute, Adelaide). Advised Israel Government on Wine and grape Industry in 1982. Honors Outstanding Medical Research Relating to Wine Award for 1982-83, Medical Friends of Wine. "Comitato Nazional Premio Umberto Biacamano," for Scientific Achievement from International du Prix European U. Biancamano, Milan, Italy, June 6, 1984. "Odine die Cavalieri delle Terre di Asti e del Monferrato" (Honors wine Scientist, Asti, Italy). Elected a member of Academie Italiana della Vite e del Vino, Siena, Italy (1988). Book on Wine Analysis was awarded a prize from the O.LV. as best book in 1988. Elected a Fellow in The Institute of Chemists (1987). First Peter B. Sherry Memorial Lecturer in Chemistry, Georgia Tech, Atlanta (1987). Travel grants to five International Symposia to present papers (since 1984). Professional Travel Italy, France, Switzerland, Hungary, Finland, Brazil, Swaziland, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Greece and Israel 69 APPENDIX II -- Bibliography of Published Works, from Bibliography on Grapes, Wines and Related SUbj~cts, by the Faculty, Staff, artdStudents of the Uni versity of California, 1876-1980, compiled by Maynard A. Amerine and Herman Phaff, pp. 156-163; and from a current bibliography compiled by Cornelius Ough. OUGH, CORNELIUS STEVEN 2328 1958 (with M. A. Amerine) Studies on aldehyde production under pressure, oxy gen and agitation. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 9: 111-122. 2329 1959 (with M. A. Amerine) Dissolved oxygen determination in wine. Food Res. 24: 744-748. 2330 1959 (with M. A. Amerine) Odor profiles of wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 9: 17 19. 2331 1959 (with H. W. Berg) Studies on various light sources concerning the evalua tion and differentiation of red wine color. I. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 10: 159-163. 2332 1959 A survey of commercial practices in sensory examination of wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 10: 191-195. 2333 1960 Die Verwendung von Glukose Oxydase in trockenem 'Weisswein. Mitt. (Klosterneuburg), Serie..A: Rebe Wein. lOA: 14-23. 2334 1960 (with E. B. Roessler, and M. A. Amerine) Effects of sulfur dioxide, tem perature, time, and closures on the quality of bottled dry white table wines. Food Tech. J.4( 7}: 352-356. 2335 1960 (with M. A. Amerine) Experiments with controlled fermentation. IV. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 11: 5-14. 2336 1960 (with M. A. Amerine) Flor sherry production by submerged culture. Food Tech. 14(3): 155-159. 2337 1960 Gelatin and polyvinylpyrrolidone compared for fining red wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 11: 170-173. 2338 1960 Odor profiles as a tool for quality control. Wines Vines 41<6': 53-54. 2339 1960 (with M. A. Amerine) Study of wines by controlled fermentations in spe cially designed equipment. Calif. Agr. 14(9}: 10. 2340 1960 (with J. L. Ingraham) Use of sorbic acid and sulfur dioxide in sweet table wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 11: 117-122. 2341 1961 Acetaldehyde formation in submerged cultures of non-filmforming species of Saccharomyces. Appl. Microbiol. 9: 316-319. 2342 1961 (with J. L. Ingraham) The diethylester of pyrocarbonic acid as a bottled wine sterilizing agent. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 12: 149-151. 2343 1961 (with H. Stone) An olfactometer for rapid and critical odor measurement. J. Food Sci. 26: 452-456. 2344 1961 (with M. A. Amerine) Polyethylene and cork closures and the fermenta tion temperature for sparkling wines. Wines Vines 42(10): 28-29. 70 2345 1961 (with G. A. Baker) Small panel sensory evaluations of wines by scoring. Hilgardia 30: 587·619. 2346 1961 (with M. A. Amerine) Studies on controlled fermentation. V. Effects on color, composition, and quality of red wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 12: 9 19. 2347 1961 (with M. A. Amerine) Studies with controlled fermentation. VI. Effects of temperature and handling rates, composition, and quality of wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 12: 117·128. 2348 1962 (with H. W. Berg, and C. O. Chichester) Approximation of percent bright· ness and dominant wave length and some blending application with red wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 13: 32·39. 2349 1962 (with M. A. Amerine) Studies with controlled fermentations. VII. Effect of ante·fermentation blending of red must and white juice on color, tan· nins, and quality of Cabernet Sauvignon wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 13: 181·188. 2350 1962 l with M. A. Amerine) Tapones de polietileno y de corcho y la temperature de fermentacion en los vinos espumosos. EI Embotellador enero·febrero: 51·52. 2351 1963 Additives tested for possible use in wine. I. Maltol, disodium inosinate, cyclohexylsulfamic acid. Wines Vines 44(3): 27-28. 2352 1963 The production of table wines in regions IV and V. Wines Vines 44(6): 56-58,60-62. 2353 1963 (with M. A. Amerine) Regional, varietal, and type influences on the degree Brix and alcohol relationship of grape musts and wines. Hilgardia 34: 585·600. 2354 1963 Uniform methods of analyses for wines and spirits. Davis, Amer. Soc. Enol. 6 pp. 2355 1963 (with M. A. Amerine) Use of grape concentrate to produce sweet table wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 14: 194·204. 2356 1964 California commercial wine analyses-1963. Wines Vines 45(5): 29-30. 2357 1964 Chemical, physical, and microbiological stability of wines and brandies. Rehovot, Israel, Wine Inst. 26 pp. In English and Hebrew. 2358 1964 (with V. L. Singleton, M. A. Amerine, and G. A. Baker) A comparison of normal and stressed-time conditions on scoring of quality and quantity attributes. J. Food Sci. 29: 506-519. 2359 1964 Die sinnemassige Erkennung von Sorbinsiiure im Wein. Mitt. (Kloster· neuburg), Serie A: Rebe Wein 14A: 260-266. 2360 1964 Fermentation rates of grape juice. 1. Effects of temperature and composi· tion on white juice fermentation rates. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 15: 167-177. 2361 1964 (with G. A. Baker) Linear dependency of scale structure in differential odor intensity measurements. J. Food Sci. 29: 499-505. 71 2362 1964 Selection of judges and sensory evaluation of wines. Rehovot, Israel, Wine Inst. 29 pp. 2363 1964 Wine growing in Israel. Israel, Ministry of Agriculture, Department of Horticulture, Extension Service. 28 pp. 2364 1965 Report to the government of Israel on wine production and the develop ment of the research winery. Rome, Food Agric. Organ. United Nations, Expanded Program of Technical Assistance Report 2025: 1·73. {FAO accession number 52025-65·ISRJ. 2365 1965 (with M. A. Amerine) Studies with controlled fennentation. IX. Benton· ite treatment of grape juice prior to wine fermentation. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 16: 185-194. 2366 1966 The analyses of 1963·bottled California commercial wines. Wines Vines 47111: 17-18. 2367 1966 (with M. A. Amerine) Effects of temperature on wine making. Calif. Agric. Exper. Stat. Bull. 827: 1-36. 2368 1966 1with C. J. Alley) An evaluation of some Cabernet varieties. Wines Vines 47(5): 23-25. 2369 1966 Fermentation rates of grape juice. II. Effect of initial degrees Brix, pH, and fennentation temperature. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 17: 20·26. 2370 1966 Fermentation rates of grape juice. III. Effects of initial ethyl alcohol, pH, and fermentation temperature. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 17: 74-81. 2371 1966 (with M. A. Amerine) Fennentation rates of grape juice. IV. Composi tional changes affecting prediction equations. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 17: 163-173. 2372 1966 (with J. F. Guymon, and E. A. Crowell) Formation of higher alcohols dur ing grape juice fermentations at various temperatures. J. Food Sci. 31: 620-625. 2373 1966 Iwith G. M. Cooke) A rapid semi-quantitative reducing sugar test for dry wines. Wines Vines 47(8): 27-29. 2374 1967 (with H. W. Berg, and C. Loinger) Acid treatment of red table wine musts for color retention. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 18: 182-189. 2375 1967 (with M. A. Amerine) Controlled fermentation. A review of controlled fer mentation experiments conducted at Davis: 1953-1966. Wines Vines 48(5): 23-28. 2376 1967 (with R. E. Kunkee) Effects of acid additions to grape juice on fennenta tion rates and wine qualities. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 18: 11-17. NOTI CE: This materia! may be protected by copyright law (Title ''t7 U.S. Code) • 72 2377 1967 (with M. A. Amerine) Rose wine color preference and preference stability by an experienced and an inexperienced panel. J. Food Sci. 32: 706·711. 2378 1967 (with M. A. Amerine) Studies with controlled fermentation. X. Effect of fermentation temperature on some volatile compounds in wine. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 18: 157-164. 2379 1968 (with M. A. Amerine) Die kontinuierliche Vergiirung Traubensaft. Mitt. Rebe Wein, Obstbau Friichteverw. 18: 428·439. 2380 1968 (with R. E. Kunkee) Fermentation rates of grape juice. V. Biotin content of juice and its effects on alcoholic fermentation rate. Appl. Microbiol. 16: 572·576. 2381 1968 (with C. J. Alley) Les raisins et les vins de type Cabernet produits dans les regions cotieres de la Californie. Connaiss. Vigne Yin 2: 99-110. 2382 1968 Proline content of grapes and wines. Vitis 7: 321-331. 2383 1968 (with J. A. Cook, and L. A. LiderJ Rootstock-scion interactions concerning wine making. II. Wine compositional and sensory changes attributed to rootstock and fertilizer level differences. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 19: 254 265. 2384 1968 (with L. A. Lider, and J. A. Cook) Rootstock-scion interactions concerning winemaking. I. Juice composition changes and effects on fermentation rate with St. George and 99-R rootstocks at two nitrogen fertilizer levels. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 19: 213·227. 2385 1968 (with V. L. Singleton) Wine quality prediction from juice Brix/acid ratio L..U (.) and associated compositional changes for White Riesling and Cabernet \-.. Sauvignon. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 19: 129·138. o Z 2386 1969 Ammonia content of California grapes. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 20: 213-220. 2387 1969 lwith H. W. Berg) Pressure fermentation of red wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 20: 118·119. 2388 1969 Rapid determination of proline in grapes and wine. J. Food Sci. 34: 228 230. 2389 1969 (with O. Bustos) A review of amino acid analytical methods and their application to grapes and wine. Wines Vines 50(4): 50-58. 2390 1969 (with M. A. Amerine, and T. C. Sparks) Studies with controlled fermenta· tion. XI. Fermentation temperature effects on acidity and pH. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 20: 127-139. 2391 1969 Substances extracted during skin contact with white musts. I. General wine composition and quality changes with contact time. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 20: 93-100. 73 2392 1970 (with M. A. Amerine) Effect of subjects' sex, experience and training on their red wine color·preference patterns. Perceptual Motor Skills 30: 395 398. 2393 1970 (with C. J. Alley) Effect of Thompson Seedless grape maturity on wine composition and quality. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 21: 78-84. 2394 1971 (with H. W. Berg, R. J. Coffelt, and G. M. Cooke) The effect on wine qual ity of simulated mechanical harvest and gondola transport of grapes. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 22: 65-70. 2395 1971 Histamine in grapes and wine. 541vs. M.S. thesis, Food Science, UC Davis. 2396 1971 Measurement of histamine in California wines. Agric. Food Chem. 19: 241-244. 2397 1971 l with H. W. Berg) Simulated mechanical harvest and gondola transport. II. Effect of temperature, atmosphere, and skin contact on chemical and sensory qualities of white wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 22: 194-198. 2398 1972 (with M. A. Amerine) Further studies with submerged flor sherry. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 23: 128-131. 2399 1972 (with D. Fong, and M. A. Amerine) Glycerol in wine: Determination and factors affecting. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 23: 1-5. 2400 1973 (with C. J. Alley, D. A. Luvisi, L. P. Christensen, P. Baranek, and F. L. Jensen) Evaluations of wine grape varieties for Madera, Fresno, Tulare, and Kern Counties. Calif. Agric. Exper. Stat. Bull. 863: 1-19. Now Publ. 1863. 2401 1973 Further investigations with glucose oxidase-catalase systems for use with wine. New York Wine Industry Technical Advisory Panel. Geneva, New York, Cornell Univ., Dept. Food Sci.Tech., New York State Agric. Exper. Stat. 16-17. 2402 1974 (with R. E. Kunkeel The effect of fumaric acid on malo·lactic fermenta· tion in wines from warm areas. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 25: 188-190. 2403 1974 (with H. W. Berg) The effect of two commercial pectic enzymes on grape musts and wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 25: 208-211. 2404 1974 (with R. M. Stashak) Further studies on proline concentration in grapes and wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 25: 7-12. 2405 1975 Dimethyldicarbonate as a wine sterilant. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 26: 130 133. 2406 1975 Further investigations with glucose oxidase-catalase enzyme systems for use with wine. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 26: 30-36. NOTICE: This material may be protected by copyright law (Titie 17 U.S. Code) 74 2407 1975 Mechanical harvesting of wine grapes, Israel. Wine fermentation. Rome, Food Agric. Organ. United Nations, AG:DP/ISRI73/001. 1: 1-28. (Consul tant report). 2408 1975 (with A. C. Noble, and D. Temple) Pectic enzyme effects on red grapes. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 26: 195-200. 2409 1976 Diethylpyrocarbonate and other potential yeast inhibitors for low alcohol sweet table wines. Wynboer 543: 73. 75, 79. 2410 1976 Ethyl carbonate in fermented beverages and foods. I. Naturally occurring ethyl carbamate. Agric. Food Chern. 24: 323-328. 2411 1976 Ethyl carbonate in fermented beverages and foods. II. Possible formation of ethyl carbonate from diethyl dicarbonate addition to wine. Agric. Food Chern. 24: 328-331. 2412 1976 (with W. A. Winton) An evaluation of the Davis wine-score card and indi vidual expert panel members. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 27: 136·144. 2413 1976 Studies to improve wines and winery practices. 67 pp., with 139 published papers. D. Sc. diss., Univ. of Stellenbosch, Univ. of South Africa. 2414 1977 Improved production method-DMPC. Progress report. San Francisco, Wine Institute, January 10. 11 pp. 2415 1977 Investigation into crop level, rootstock and maturity effects on wine qual ity. Report on project V-8I-77. San Francisco, Wine Institute, Vinicul tural Comm. meeting, January 28. 4 pp. 2416 1978 A Davis scientist reviews an excellent fungicide, DEDC. Wines Vines 59(4): 30-32. 2417 1978 Enzymes: Their use in grapes and wine (other than the enzyme systems normally associated with fermentation!. Proc. Fifth Annual Wine Ind. Tech. Seminar (November 25, 1978, Monterey). 65-69. 2418 1978 (with L. L. Langbehn, and P. A. Stafford) Influence of pH and ethanol on the effectiveness of dimethyldicarbonate in controlling yeast growth in model wine systems. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 29: 60-62. 2419 1978 (with M. L. Groat) Particle nature, yeast strain, and temperature interac tions on the fermentation rates of grape juice. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 35: 881-885. 2420 1979 (with H. Tabacman) Gas chromatographic determinations of amino acid differences in Cabernet Sauvignon grapes and wines as affected by rootstocks. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 30: 306-311. 2421 1979 Improved production methods-DEPC-DMPC studies. Final report on pro ject T-62(a)-77. San Francisco, Wine Institute, July 28. 1 p. 75 2422 1979 (with E. A. Crowell) Pectic-enzyme treatment of white grapes: tempera ture, variety and skin-contact time factors. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 30: 22 27. ! 2423 1979 (with H. W. Berg) Powdery mildew sensory effect on wine. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 30: 321. 2424 1979 (with A. Caputi, Jr., and M. Groat) A rapid colorimetric calcium method. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 30: 58-60. 2425 1979 (with G. Analli! Zinfandel grape juice protein fractions and their amino acid makeup as affected by crop level. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 30: 8-10. 2426 1980 A comparison of tyramine in wine and other foods. U. S. Pharmacist 5(4): 52-53. 2427 1980 (with A. A. Bell) Effects of nitrogen fertilization of grapevines on amino acid metabolism and higher-alcohol formation during grape juice fermen tation. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 31: 122·123. 2428 1980 Fermentation variables as they affect table wine composition and quality. Vinifera Wine Growers J. 7: 139·146. 2429 1980 (with C. A. Corison) Measurement of patulin in grapes and wines. J. Food Sci. 45: 476-478. 2430 1980 (with E. A. Crowell) Nitrate determination in California musts and wines. Amer. J. Enol. Vitic. 31: 344·346. 2431 1980 Vineyard and fermentation practices affecting wine. Calif. Agr. 34( 7): 17-18. 2432 1980 Volatile esters in wine-source and data. Proc. Symp. Grape Wine Cen tennial (UC Davis), 336·341. *143. 1980 Daudt, C. E. and C. S. OUgh. Action of dimethy1dicarbonate on various yeasts. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 31(1):21-23. 145. 1980 Amerine, M. A., H. W. Berg, R. E. Kunkee, C. S. OUgh, V. L. Singleton, and A. D. Webb. The technology of wine making. Fourth edition. Avi Publishing Company, Inc., Westport, Connecticut. xi, 794 p. Also published in Japanese, 1982. 146. 1980 Amerine, M. A. and C. S. OUgh. Methods for analysis of musts and wines. John Wiley & Sons, New York, Chichester, Brisbane, Toronto, A. Wi1ey-Interscience Publication, x, 341 p. *147. 1980 Ramey, D. D. and C. S. OUgh. Volatile ester hydrolysis or formation during storage of model solutions and wines. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 28(5):928-934. 76 *150. 1980 Daudt, C. E. and C. S. Ough. A method for detecting volatile amines in grapes and wines. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 31(4):356-359. *151. 1981 Ough, C. S. and T. H. Lee. Effect of vineyard nitrogen fertilization level on the formation of some fermentation esters. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 32(2):125-127. *152. 1981 Lowenberg, D. W., C. S. Ough, S. Lepkovsky, and F. F. Furuta. The effect of ethanol and wine on the plasma histamine level of chickens and man. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 32(2):128-131. *153. 1981 Ough, C. S., C. E. Daudt, and E. A. Crowell. Identification of new volatile amines in grapes and wines. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 29(5):938-941. *154. 1981 Ough, C. S. and C. E. Daudt. Quantitative determination of volatile amines in grapes and wines. I. Effect of fermentation and storage temperature on amine concentrations. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 32(3):185-188. *155. 1981 Brown, M. R. and C. S. Ough. A comparison of activity and effects of two commercial pectic enzyme preparations on white grape musts and wines. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 32(4):272-276. *156. 1981 Watts, D. A., C. S. Ough, and W. D. Brown. Residual amounts of proteinaceous additives in table wine. Journal of Food Science 46(3):681-683, 687. *157. 1982 Brown, M. R. and C. S. Ough. Effects of two different pectic enzyme preparations, at several activity levels, on three pectin fractions of a white must. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 33(1):41-43. *158. 1982 Famuyiwa, O. and C. S. Ough. Grape pomace: Possibilities as animal feed. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 33(1):44-46. *159. 1982 Soles, R. M., C. S. Ough, and R. E. Kunkee. Ester concentration differences in wine fermented by various species and strains of yeast. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 33(2):94-98. *160. 1982 Ough, C. S., E. A. Crowell, and J. Benz. Metal content of California Wines. Journal of Food Science 47(3):825-828. 161. 1982 Ough, C. S. Volatile esters in wines--source and fate, p. 336-341. In: University of California. Davis Grape and Wine Centennial Symposium Proceedings. *162. 1982 Daudt, C. E. and C. S. Ough. Volatile amines in Vitis vinifera varieties and changes during maturation. Vitis 21:105-110. 77 *163. 1982 Porter, L. J. and C. S. OUgh. The effects of ethanol, temperature, and dimethyl dicarbonate on viability of Saccharomyces cerevisiae Montrachet No. 522 in wine. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 33(4):222-25. *164. 1982 OUgh, C. S. and C. L. Winger. Changes in non-volatile compounds and extracts of wines due to yeast species and fermentation temperature. South African Journal of Enology and Viticulture 3(1):17-21. *165. 1983 A1my, J., C. S. OUgh, and E. A. Crowell. Identification of two new volatile amines in wine. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 31:911-913. *166. 1983 OUgh, C. S. Sulfur dioxide and su1fites, Chapter 7, p. 177-203. In, Alfred L. Branen and P. Michael Davidson (Eds.), Antimicrobials in Foods, Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York. *167. 1983 OUgh, C. S. Dimethyl dicarbonate and diethy1 dicarbonate, Chapter 10, p. 299-325. In, Alfred L. Branen and P. Michael Davidson (Eds.), Antimicrobials in Foods, Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York. *168. 1983 Masyczek, R. and C. S. OUgh. The "Red wine reaction" syndrome. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 34(2):260-264. *169. 1984 OUgh, C. S. and R. Nagaoka. Effect of cluster thinning and vineyard yields on grape and wine quality of Cabernet Sauvignon. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 35(1):30-34. *170. 1984 OUgh, C. S. Volatile nitrogen compounds in fermented beverages. In, L. Nykanen and P. Lehtonen (Eds.), Flavour Research of Alcoholic Beverages, Proceedings of the A1ko Symposium, Helsinki, Finland, June 14, 1984. *171. 1985 OUgh, C. S. Some effects of temperature and S02 on wine during simulated transport or storage. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 36(1):18-22. *172. 1985 Sanders, E. M. and C. S. OUgh. Determination of free amino acids in wine by HPLC. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 36(1):43-46. *173. 1985 Gershwin, M. E., C. S. OUgh, A. Bock, M. P. Fletcher, S. M. Nagy, and D. S. Tuft. Grand rounds: Adverse reactions to wine. The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, March 1985, p. 411-420. *174. 1985 Crowell, E. A., C. S. Ough, and A. Baka1insky. Research Note: Determination of alpha amino nitrogen in musts and wines by TNBS method. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 36(2) :175-177. 78 *175. 1985 Ough, C. S. and Abraham Kriel. Ammonia concentrations of musts of different grape cultivars and vineyards in the Stellenbosch area. South African Journal for Enology and Viticulture 6(1):7-11. *176. 1985 Mesias, J. L. and C. S. Ough. Comparacion de sistemas de extraccion de pomponentes volatiles de uvas en soluciones modelos. Semana Vitivinicola 40(2010):519-523. *177. 1985 Halpern, G. M., M. E. Gershwin, C. S. Ough, M. P. Fletcher, and S. M. Nagy, Jr. The effect of white wine upon pulmonary function of asthmatic subjects. Annals of Allergy 55(5):686-690. *178. 1985 Jones, R. S. and C. S. Ough. Variations in the percent ethanol (vjv) per Brix conversions of wines from different climatic regions. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 36(4):268~270. *179. 1985 Ough, C. S. Determination of sulfur dioxide in grapes and wines. Journal of the Association of Official Analytical Chemists 69(1):5-7. *180. 1986 Ramey, D., A. Bertrand, C. S. Ough, V. L. Singleton, and E. Sanders. 1986. Effects of skin contact temperature on Chardonnay must and wine composition. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 37(2):99-106. *181. 1987 Ough, C. S. Chemicals used in making wine. Chemical and Engineering News 65:19-28. *182. 1987 Ough, C. S., E. A. Crowell, R. E. Kunkee, M. R. Vilas, and S. Lagier. A study of histamine production by various wine bacteria in model solutions and in wine. Journal of Food Processing and Preservation 12:63-70. *183. 1987 Ough, C. S. and E. A. Crowell. Use of sulfur dioxide in winemaking. Journal of Food Science 52(2):386-388, 393. *184. 1987 Ough, C. S. Use of PET bottles for wine. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 38(2):100-104. *185. 1987 Ohkubo, T. and C. S. Ough. An analytical survey of four California varietal white table wines. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 38(3):171-175. *186. 1987 Ohkubo, T., A. C. Noble, C. S. Ough. Evaluation of California wines by sensory and chemical analyses. Science Aliments 7(4):573-587. 79 187. 1988 Ough, C. S. and M. A. Amerine. Methods for analysis of musts and wines. Second Edition. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 377 p. *188. 1988 Ough, C. S., E. A. Crowell, and B. R. Gut1ove. Carbamyl compound reactions with ethanol. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 39(3):239-242. *189. 1988 Ough, C. S., E. A. Crowell, and L. A. Mooney. Formation of ethyl carbamate precursors during grape juice (Chardonnay) fermentation. I. Addition of amino acids, urea, and ammonia: Effects of fortification on intracellular and extracellular precursors. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 39(3):243-249. *190. 1988 Nakamura, S., E. A. Crowell, C. S. Ough, and A. Totsuka. Quantitative analysis of -nona1actone in wines and its threshold determination. Journal of Food Science 53(4):1243-1244. *191. 1988 Ough, C. S. and G. Trio1i. Urea removal from wine by an acid urease. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 39(4):319 323. *192. 1988 Ough, C. S., R. E. Kunkee, M. R. Vilas, E. Bordeu and M.-C. Huang. The interaction of sulfur dioxide, pH and dimethyl dicarbonate on the growth of Saccharomyces cerevisiae Montrachet and Leuconostoc ~ MCW. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 39(4):279 282. *193. 1988 Ough, C. S. Acids and amino in Grapes and Wines. In, H. F. Linskens and J. F. Jackson (Eds.), Modern Methods of Plant Analysis 6:92-146. *194. 1988 Ough, C. S. Determination of sulfur dioxide in grapes and wine. In, H. F. Linskens and J. F. Jackson (Eds.), Modern Methods of Plant Analysis 6:339-358. *195. 1989 Ough, C. S. The Changing California Wine Industry. Journal of Science for Food and Agriculture, 7:257-268. *196. 1989 A1my, J. and C. S. Ough. Urea Analysis for Wines. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 37:968-970 *197. 1989 Foott, J. H., C. S. OUgh, and J. A. Wolpert. Rootstock effects on wine grapes. California Agriculture, July-August 1989, p. 27-29. *198. 1989 Huang, Z. and C. S. Ough. Effect of vineyard locations, varieties and rootstocks on the juice ~ino acid composition of several cu1tivars. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 40:135 139. *199. 1989 Ough, C. S., M. Davenport, and K. Joseph. Effects of certain vitamins on growth and fermentation rate of several commercial active dry wine yeasts. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 40:208-213. 80 *200. 1989 OUgh, C. S., D. Stevens and J. A1my. Preliminary comments on effects of grape vineyard nitrogen fertilization on the subsequent ethyl carbamate formation in wines. Research Note. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 40:219-220. *201. 1989 Trio1i, G. and C. S. OUgh. Causes for inhibition of an acid urease from lactobacillus fermentus. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 40:245-252. *202. 1990 OUgh, C. S., D. Stevens, T. Sendovski, Z. Huang and D. An. Factors contributing to urea formation in commercially fermented wines. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 41:68-73. *203. 1990 Famuyiwa, O. O. and C. S. OUgh. Effect of structural constituents of cell wall on the digestibility of grape pomace. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 38:966-968. 81 INDEX -- Cornelius Ough American Society for Viticulture and fermentation, 8, 9, 11, 16, 17 Enology, 55, 56 Food and Drug Administration, 14, Amerine, Maynard A., 3-6, 8, 9, 12, 21, 26, 27, 47, 48, 57 34, 54 Foott, Jack, 17, 60 ammonia electrode, 20 Fresno State University, 55 Australia, 63 Gallo, Ernest and Julio, 12 Beaulieu Vineyard, 16, 32, 33 Gallo Winery, 12, 17 Berg, Harold W., 20, 23, 32, 54 genetic engineering, 40-42 Bisson, Linda, 10, 40, 47 grape juice, watering of, 28-30 bottles, silicon coating on, 7 bottling, 20 Boulton, Roger, 10 harvesting, mechanical, 18, 22, 23, Brazil, 51 49 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and headaches, from red wine, 24-26 Firearms, 23, 47 Henschke, Paul, 48 Hil~ardia, 29 histamine study, 19, 24-26 Cal A~~ie, 25 California A~riculture, 60 Carmel winery (Israel), 50 Ingraham, John, 13, 14 Carneros Creek vineyard, 39 Israel, 49-51 chromatography, 11 Clarke Oxygen Electrode, 13 clonal trials, 39, 40 Journal of A~riculture and Food Coffelt, Jack, 18 Chemistry, 22 Cook, James, 36 Cruess, William V., 3, 10 Kliewer, Walter M., 36, 39 Krug, Charles, winery, 5, 16 Daudt, Carlos, 20, 23, 51 Kunkee, Ralph, 10 Davies, Jack, 32 diethyl dicarbonate, 21 diethyl pyrocarbonate [DEPC], 14, label warnings, 57, 58 21 Lider, Lloyd A. , 36 equipment, 11, 44, 45 Martini, Louis P., 31 ethyl carbamate, 14, 42, 52 Methods for Analysis of Musts and see also urethane Wines, 63 mold and rot, 22, 23 82 Mondavi, Robert, 5, 6 Tche1istcheff, Andre, 16, 17, 32, Mrak, Emil, 15 33 Technology of Winemaking, 10 Nelson, K1ayton E., 36 Nightingale, Myron, 12 United Nations, 49 University of California, Davis, 3 6, 12, 15, 31-37, 47 01mo, Harold P., 8, 9, 40 Environmental Toxicology Orfer, Chris, 52 Department, 14 Ough, Cornelius University of Ste11enbosch, 52 as lab technician 1950, 3, 4 urethane, 14, 21,22, 42, 43, 46-48 as UC Davis winemaker, 5-31 see also ethyl carbamate becomes eno1ogist, 9 childhood and education, 1, 2 in military service, 4, 5 Van Wyk, Joel, 52 work abroad, 49-53, 63 Viticulture and Enology Research oxygen, dissolved, 13 Institute (South Africa), 52 pesticides, 14, 15 Webb, A. Dinsmoor, 36 phy11oxera, 41, 60, 61 Wine Advisory Board, 54, 55 Pichia, 20 Wine Institute, 23 Posson, Philip, 12 Technical Advisory Committee, 5, Proposition 65 [California], 57 54, 55 winemaking, teaching of, 31-35 Winemaking Basics, 10 Rankine, Bryce, 53 wines Rapp, Dr. [German scientist], 53 color of, 15 rootstocks, 17, 18, 60-62 esters in, 19, 20 headaches from, 24-26 histamine in, 19, 24, 25 Sacchromyces cerev~s~ae, 20, 40 metals in, 23, 24 Science journal, 22 oxygen in, 13, 20 Scripps Research Institute Clinic, red, 7 26, 27 sensory evaluation of, 59 Sendvoski, Tally, 50 sorbic acid in, 13, 14 Sierra Wine company, 12 table, 9 Simon, Ronald, 26, 27 Winkler, Albert J., 5 Singleton, Vernon W., 10, 53 sodium in wines, 23 Sommers, Chris, 53 yeast, 43, 44 South Africa, 51-53 Stern, Peter, 50 sulfur dioxide trials, 26-28 83 Grape Varieties Mentioned in the Interview Calzin, 9 Chardonnay, 40 Pinot noir, 39 Ruby Cabernet, 9 Zinfandel, 40 Wines Mentioned in the Interview Cabernet Sauvignon, 33, 39 sherry, flor, 11-13 Ruth Teiser Born in Portland, Oregon; came to the Bay Area in 1932 and has lived here ever since. Stanford University, B.A., M.A. in English; further graduate work in Western history. Newspaper and magazine writer in San Francisco since 1943, writing on local history and business and social life of the Bay Area. Book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, 1943-1974. Co-author of Winemaking in California, a history, 1982. An interviewer-editor in the Regional Oral History Office since 1965.