New Grape Vine Disease

New Grape Vine Disease

New Grape Vine Disease. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The last thing a wine grape grower want to hear is about a new disease that is making its way around vineyards. Naidu Rayapati, Associate Professor of Virology at WSU.

RAYAPATI: It’s new in the sense we have been observing these symptoms even before but we were under the impression this was part of the leaf roll disease complex. But now we realize as we did some additional research that some of these symptoms are not entirely because of leaf roll disease

Rayapati says they did a lot more research on this new disease.

RAYAPATI: It turns out that it’s a new virus which was not known earlier infecting grape vines so that’s the beginning of our revisiting this whole issue of the symptoms whether it is leaf roll or because it is of this new virus problem. These kinds of symptoms have been noticed in other parts of the country like in California and New York.

This new disease appears to be very widespread across many wine growing regions and he says it attacks both the vine and the fruit.

RAYAPATI: Actually it’s both because again we did some work during the 2012 season and what we have seen was that significant reduction in fruit yield. For example 22% in Merlot and about 30 some percent in fruit yield production in Cabernet Franc.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network. 

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