ACCREDITED COLLEGE DEGREE ONLINE DEGREE

Study wine with experts

Want to learn about wine? That is, really learn about wine? You don’t have to enroll at UC Davis. Stay in Oregon. Take college viticulture and enology classes online. Costs are low ($64 a unit) and there are jobs waiting for qualified workers.

Read about the Southern Oregon Wine Institute in this month’s Oregon Wine Press (www.oregonwinepress.com):

2010 Organization of the Year: Southern Oregon Wine Institute
By Janet Eastman
If you listen closely enough to people in Oregon’s wine industry, you’ll hear a word repeated as if it’s a prayer on everyone’s lips: education.
Earl Jones of Abacela is not building a new tasting room on his property in Winston, but a two-story educational center. There will be a viewing deck overlooking a patchwork quilt of various vineyards, a self-guided specimen garden and a tunnel that leads to the winery. Jones has found, as have wine store managers and sommeliers around the state, that consumers ask for very technical details when introduced to a label or varietal.
But wine drinkers are not the only ones looking for an education. Growers and vintners who have been at this long before Oregon’s wine was in the global spotlight still show up when experts give vineyard demonstrations. For those charged with selling wine, there are daylong marketing symposiums and short seminars that teach servers to promote Oregon’s star bottled beverage. For investors, there are meetings to report on regions that have wine to thank for their economic vigor. And for job seekers, classrooms are one way to enter an industry that’s here to stay.
If the information that can improve Oregon’s wine industry is out there, there needs to be a mechanism for getting it to the people who need it here. Umpqua Community College in Roseburg is ready to help.
In a few years, the college’s Southern Oregon Wine Institute (SOWI) has grown from administrators compiling a wish list from members of the Umpqua Valley Winegrowers Association to providing the industry with vital lab services, access to cutting-edge research and invitations to confab at Wine Cluster Conferences. But perhaps most important, SOWI is set up to produce ready-to-work employees.
The institute’s viticulture and enology programs are founded on the practical concept of learning by doing. Or what John Olson of Palotai Vineyard & Winery, who taught SOWI’s Class of 2010, calls “hands-in-the-wine, hose-in-the-face” training.
SOWI’s students take online classes to learn the science of growing grapes and producing wine. Then they put their studies to the test in vineyards, labs, wineries and tasting rooms, working alongside pros.
“Winemaking is an art of action and decisions; these simply cannot be learned in the classroom,” says Olson, who hired one of SOWI’s graduates to work in his Roseburg winery. “The hands-on aspects and the required cooperative work experience credits have been invaluable tools in training the students.”
To better execute this soil-to-sales approach to wine education, the community college will unveil the $7-million Danny Lang Teaching, Learning and Event Center in September. Surrounded by five acres of vineyards, the center will include a commercial-scale winery, a conference hall large enough for 500 people and a tasting room where the public is invited to learn about wine.
Sutherlin attorney Danny Lang, for whom the center is named, donated $800,000 to the building fund, even though he jokes that he drinks three bottles of wine a year and can’t pronounce the names of half the grapes in the wine. But he, like other SOWI’s supporters—from timber barons to bankers, real estate investors to ma-and-pa donors—believe education and wine prosperity will boost the entire region.
Farmland will be more productive. Local businesses will find a way to profit. Jobs will be created. Wine tourism dollars will be spent on lodging, restaurants, transportation. In short: money all around.
Dr. Blaine Nisson was the president of UCC who listened five years ago to the industry’s pleas for educated workers and then asked the community to help fund SOWI and the center. Nisson says the wine institute is one of his top achievements and although he retired from the president’s position in December, he plans to be there when the 24,000-square-foot Lang Center opens it doors.
The center is being built in a church-like location, on top of a hill on the UCC campus. When completed, it will be a statement that some of Southern Oregon’s business leaders and educators have placed their faith in the next generation of wine workers. Which prompts the question: What do they know?
BEYOND BOOKS
Oak barrels filled with student-produced wine surround SOWI’s director Chris Lake. He is now opening a bottle of First Blush, the class’ 2009 rosé made from donated Merlot grapes. Yes, this is teaching.
Lake, a viticulturist and winemaker, used to get in trouble for taking the time to teach. When he was managing vineyards in Arkansas for one of th

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