Wine Country On High Alert For Southern California Pest
HEALDSBURG (CBS13) – It may not the centerpiece of Louis Foppiano's vineyard in Healdsburg, but a bug trap is doing some serious work saving his livelihood from ruin.
"You'll lose a vine immediately," Foppiano said. "Within a year or two years, you'll have a dead vine."
The glassy-winged sharpshooter is tiny, about a half inch. But it can kill plants and vines by spreading Pierce's Disease, which cuts off a plant's water supply.
"Just think of it as mosquitos and malaria, it's exactly the same thing," Foppiano said.
Assistant Agricultural Commission Lisa Correia is waging war against the pest, preventing its spread from Southern California. Warm weather and an early spring has increased the threat.
"We have a 600 million dollar wine grape industry to protect," Correia said.
Bright yellow sharpshooter traps are a common sight, and every shipment of plants arriving from the southland is inspected. Recently, eggs from a sharpshooter were found on cargo shipment.
"Fortunately, they checked the system and we were able to find it and we were able to ship the plants back to Southern California so we don't have the plants here," Correia said.
Deanna Tubbs at Pricket's Nursery says inspections of new plants happen every week.
"They look under each leaf, and they look under the leaves and see if we have any egg masses," Tubbs said.
It may seem excessive, but consider this: The sharpshooter decimated thousands of acres of vineyards in Temecula in 1999 and no one wants history repeating itself here.