A SPECIAL GROWERS’ REPORT OF AG ALERT ® CALIFORNIA Trees & Vines ®
Richard Loquaci of Madera Agricultural Services checks on vine-dried raisins in the Central Valley. The Loquaci family manages farming of Selma Pete grapes for the Madera County raisin snack company Life’s Grape.
Grape variety is key to family’s vine-dried raisin snack By Linda DuBois An interest in healthy snacking has increased demand for many specialty crops grown in California, including vine-dried raisins.
one-third is exported to nearly 50 countries, with Asia and Europe being the top two export markets. In 2021, there were 829,000 bearing acres of grapes in vineyards across the Golden State, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Of that total, raisins account for 136,000 acres, enough to satisfy virtually all of the nation’s raisin demand. Traditionally, raisins are laid out on paper trays in the vineyard to dry, giving them the caramelized consistency most people are familiar with. Because Selma Pete grapes dry under the shade of the vines and leaves, the skins stay softer, Gillespie said. Her maternal grandparents, George and Lenna Wagner, started their first vineyard in the Madera-Fresno area in 1985, founding River Ranch Raisins, a multi-vineyard operation. For about the first 20 years, the family grew Thompson seedless grapes and pivoted to the Selma Pete in 2007. Now, their 2,185-acre business grows exclusively Selma Petes. The Life’s Grape raisins are processed and packaged into three size options—sin- gle-serve packs, 4 1/2-to-6-ounce bags and 10-to-13-ounce bags—at the River Ranch Raisins processing plant in Kerman. Family members purchased the facility in 2015 to handle their processing in-house. “We are a true family business,” Gillespie said. “My mother and I are the Life’s Grape founders, and my brother (Austin) and my dad (Troy) are more on the processing side.” For almost 40 years, another local family business, Madera Agricultural Services, has See RAISINS, Page 7
Raisins are the essential ingredients for a Madera County business venture known as Life’s Grape, which provides supermarket and online customers with flavored raisins coated with peanut butter, chocolate and more. “We call them nature’s gummy bears because they have a lot of meat to them. When you squish them, they bounce back,” said Courtney Gillespie, who founded Life’s Grape with her mother, Basia, in 2019. The key to the raisin’s plumpness, she said, is the Selma Pete , a grape variety developed by researchers at the University of California, Davis, by combining the Thompson seedless, Fiesta seedless and Muscat. It was released in 2001. The traditional raisin grape—the Thompson seedless—was becoming difficult to grow because of the availability of labor and water, and other challenges, explained Gillespie, who comes from a family of Central Valley raisin farmers. “They came up with this new variety that uses half the water and dries on the vine, which is a result of the Fiesta grape, and the Thompson maintained the characteristics of a tra- ditional raisin, and then the Muscat gave it some nice meatiness and juiciness,” she said. Two-thirds of the nation’s raisin production is consumed in the U.S. and Canada, while
6 Ag Alert January 10, 2024
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