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Spring Grapes: Freshness Closer To Home
More varieties and volume expected from Mexico and Coachella.
Every year, as the calendar turns to May, the table grapes on supermarket shelves become a little bit fresher.
The transition from the counter- seasonal vineyards in Chile to grapes from the Coachella Valley in Southern Cali- fornia and Sonora, Mexico, on the border with Arizona signals there is a far shorter distance
for the fruit to travel from harvest to market. “The grapes from Mexico get to the border within 24 hours after being picked,” says Earl McMenamin, sales manager for Pacific Trellis Fruit, Los Angeles. “They can get from the ranch to the shelf in a couple of days, which makes them a lot fresher than the imports that
have been on the boat for a week or two.”
FRESHNESS YOU CAN TASTE
Pacific Trellis, a 20-year old company, uses a global network of growers to market year- round supplies of grapes, peaches, nectarines, pears and, more recently, watermelons and cantaloupes.
The company, which also operates under the name Dulcinea Farms, has an active grape breeding program aimed largely at producing fruit of superior flavor. Pacific Trellis expects to ship 1.1 million cartons from Mexico this spring — predominantly equal amounts of red and green — with a representative sampling of black and globe varieties.
“This year it looks like a good season; the weather has been good so far,” says McMenamin. “It’s too early to know for sure, but some people are estimating there will be 20 to 22 million cartons out of Mexico. Last year wasn’t good at all. There were weather issues, but nobody can pinpoint it exactly. There were only around 17 million cartons out of Mexico. California is a lot bigger deal. There are 110 to 115 million boxes out of the Central Valley.”
The overwhelming majority of the spring grapes come out of Sonora, as Coachella Valley production is miniscule compared to the summer harvest out of California’s Central Valley.
“Desert grapes account for between 3
BY BOB JOHNSON
40/ APRIL 2019 / PRODUCE BUSINESS
percent and 4 percent of California produc- tion,” says John Pandol, director of special projects at Pandol Bros. Inc, Delano, CA. “In May and June, Mexico accounts of 85 percent of the fresh grapes.”
Pandol Bros. Inc. is a 70-year-old grow- er-shipper marketing table grapes and blueber- ries out of its facilities in Delano, CA., Nogales, AZ., and the port of Wilmington, DE.
In offering the company’s estimates of the size and arrival date of the spring grape harvest, major shippers and grower organizations walk a line between being too early to be accurate or too late to be useful.
“The Sonora Spring Summit was moved to mid-March from late April, as the growers realize announcing the crop right before harvest does them no good,” says Pandol. “Pandol has always put out its first guide on St. Patrick’s Day, and the second update on income tax day, or April 15.”
Although more than 90 percent of Mexi- co’s grape shipments come from Sonora on the border with Arizona, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricul- tural Statistics, acreage also has been planted recently in nearby Baja, CA and a few hundred miles south toward Mexico City, in Zacatecas.
“As a sidebar, there is experimentation going on in Mexico with the idea of producing grapes in March-April, although these should be considered trials,” says Pandol. “It remains to be seen if these tropical areas can be tech- nically and economically viable. Later areas — July-September — have existed for years but have focused on the Mexican market. There are plantings with newer varieties that may be viable for domestic and export.”
For now, the spring or desert grapes out of Sonora begin in early May and continue until mid-July.
“The normal start time for the Coachella spring grape deal is around the 15th of May,” says John Harley, vice president of sales and marketing at Anthony Vineyards, Visalia, CA. “And it looks like that will be the start date for 2019 grape season. It normally ends the last week of June.”
From its headquarters in the heart of the Central Valley, Anthony Vineyards ships organic and conventional grapes.
“It looks like Mexico could be ahead of us in Coachella because of the new districts they have planted grapes in,” says Harley. “Normally the Chilean deal only affects the red seedless grape deal with their Crimson Seedless coming