Unique Grape Varieties - America's Heartland

We're harvesting cotton candy grapes today. This particular field we're in is the largest cotton candy vineyard in the world. You heard that right, cotton candy grapes. This hard-working crew isn't harvesting a fluffy sugar-spun treat. They're picking all-natural table grapes grown under the sun in the southern part of California's San Joaquin Valley. Thanks to science, these grapes taste a little bit like the popular carnival food, hence the name cotton candy grapes. The only grower in the U.S. growing this variety is Grapery. The company was founded by Jack Pandahl in 1996. Its headquarters just north of the city of Bakersfield. We are primarily a producer of table grapes. So we we have farms, we grow the fruit, we harvest the fruit, and we ship the fruit all over the United States and internationally. In order to set themselves apart from other table grapes on the market and remain profitable, Grapery has evolved from a traditional producer of table grapes to one that takes risks by developing grapes with unique flavors and shapes. Jim Beagle is the CEO and co-owner who has been with the company for 15 years. When I joined Grapery, it was Jack and I and someone in the office and a foreman in the field. And it was a really small company and we've been building it ever since then. For our industry, we've grown really rapidly in the last dozen years. So how did they do it? Both Jack and Jim understand agriculture. Jim's a fifth generation California farmer. His family's been in ag since the gold rush. Jack's grandparents started farming in the San Joaquin Valley after arriving from the islands off Croatia at the turn of the century. They each have ag degrees from UC Davis. Jim has an MBA from Harvard. California agriculture really has become throughout my lifetime a much more modern and sophisticated business. Grapery works with international fruit genetics to create new varieties of grapes. One of the really cool things about grapes genetically is the diversity of the gene pool worldwide. You know from the climates that they can grow in, the uniqueness of shapes, of colors and so on. Developing a new grape variety is no easy task. Sometimes it's a success, a lot of times it's not. It may require years of testing and getting growing conditions just right. Most important, people have to like the taste or the fruit won't sell. Even though cotton candy's been around now for almost 20 years, from from when it was first crossed, it's been in the market about 10 years. Consumers, there's still consumers that don't know about it. So it's a huge challenge and that's true of all of our varieties. While the cotton candy grape may be grapery's most well-known variety, they have several others. The moondrop is an elongated black grape that's crunchy and firm. The gumdrop is a red sweet grape meant to taste like candy. The teardrop is a green elongated grape. Like all grapefruit products, they are picked at peak sweetness. The secret to what we do at Grapery is we let the grapes get really ripe before we pick them. That's easy to say, it's really hard to do. There's no textbooks or classes you can take on how to grow table grapes for great flavor. We had to innovate around all the different farming and harvesting practices that it takes to grow grapes that consistently taste great. If I don't hear from consumers, that means I haven't wowed them. I have to deliver a product that is so fantastic that people will take the time to send a Facebook or an Instagram message or an email to us or TikTok. So it's all about the eating experience for the consumer. California farms produce 99 percent of the table grapes sold in the United States, keeping a fresh supply of grapes in stores from May to January. Harvest starts in the spring at farms in southern California's Coachella Valley. By the middle of the summer, harvest is in full swing at farms like Grapery in the San Joaquin Valley. But no matter the season, the goal is the same, to produce the world's premier grapes. We have to tell our story about why these are great tasting grapes and give people a reason to try our grapes for the first time and to follow us and engage with us and try our new varieties as they come out. You've heard it over and over again, if you want to do something really well, you have to be passionate about it. I hope you've seen my passion for doing this, but our whole team is passionate about this. It drives us every day. You may wonder about the difference between table grapes, which are meant for snacking, and wine grapes, which are grown for, well, wine. Table grapes are generally seedless, plump, and have a thin skin, giving them a nice pop when you bite into them. Wine grapes have thicker skin, contain seeds, and are smaller in size. Wine grapes are also much sweeter than table grapes, which is important because high sugar levels are needed during fermentation to convert to alcohol. Wine grapes are harvested later in the season than table grapes, allowing those sugars to concentrate.