About Tom Plocher
Tom has been breeding grapes in Hugo, Minnesota since 1996. But his interest in grapes and wine goes back to 1978. Tom was working in Germany during the autumn of 1978 and spent weekends touring the wineries and vineyards of the Mosel River Valley. It was a major life event. He came back to Minnesota and planted Cayuga White grapevines in 1979 and learned to make wine. He met Elmer Swenson and decided that was the guy to learn from. Elmer became Tom’s mentor and friend.
One lesson from Elmer was to deeply understand the varieties you are using for parents. Between 1980 and 1996, Tom grew over 100 grape varieties-French Hybrids, U of Minnesota selections, Elmer Swenson and David Macgregor selections. Tom evaluated these in the vineyard. He also produced and evaluated wine samples from almost all of them. Together with his close friend, winemaker Gordon Rouse, he conducted controlled freezing tests on dormant buds from a host of grape selections. From these experiments, he selected the cultivars that he would use as “super-hardy parents” in his crosses. A series of nasty 40 below zero winters validated the controlled freezing results. From the the many wine samples he produced, Tom identified the cultivars he would use as “quality parents” in his crosses. These ten years of experimentation with many different grape varieties set the stage for the first crosses in 1996, which would lead to Petite Pearl, Crimson Pearl and Verona.
Another lesson Tom learned from Elmer was the value of casting a wide net and combining diverse breeding lines in crossings. Tom’s “super-hardy parents” come from three distinctly different lines of breeding: E.S. 10-18-06 and E.S. 10-18-14 from Elmer Swenson, MN 1094 from the University of Minnesota, and Riparia x St. Croix #5 and DM 8521-1 from David Macgregor. His “quality parents” have come from an even wider range of breeding programs including Elmer Swenson, the University of Minnesota, and Wisconsin breeder, Mark Hart, in the U.S. He also has relationships with the German Federal Research Institute-Geweilerhof, Germany, UC-Davis, Cornell University, and private grape breeders in Denmark, China, and Russia. All have been generous in providing Tom with pollen of valuable and often rare wine grape varieties to use as quality parents. Among the native species used in Tom's recent crosses are Vitis palmata and vitis cinerea to introduce the trait of very slow spring growth. He has used Vitis amurensis from the Changbai Mountain area (Jilin Province) of northeastern China as a hardy pollen parent that is more neutral in flavor and has a larger cluster than Vitis riparia.
Until 2011, Tom worked as a staff scientist at the corporate laboratory of Honeywell International, Inc.. Since retiring from Honeywell in December, 2011, he has had much more time to devote to his grape breeding endeavors, which he continues to support with his own time, resources, and personal enthusiasm.
Click here for a timeline and history of Tom's grape breeding work
One lesson from Elmer was to deeply understand the varieties you are using for parents. Between 1980 and 1996, Tom grew over 100 grape varieties-French Hybrids, U of Minnesota selections, Elmer Swenson and David Macgregor selections. Tom evaluated these in the vineyard. He also produced and evaluated wine samples from almost all of them. Together with his close friend, winemaker Gordon Rouse, he conducted controlled freezing tests on dormant buds from a host of grape selections. From these experiments, he selected the cultivars that he would use as “super-hardy parents” in his crosses. A series of nasty 40 below zero winters validated the controlled freezing results. From the the many wine samples he produced, Tom identified the cultivars he would use as “quality parents” in his crosses. These ten years of experimentation with many different grape varieties set the stage for the first crosses in 1996, which would lead to Petite Pearl, Crimson Pearl and Verona.
Another lesson Tom learned from Elmer was the value of casting a wide net and combining diverse breeding lines in crossings. Tom’s “super-hardy parents” come from three distinctly different lines of breeding: E.S. 10-18-06 and E.S. 10-18-14 from Elmer Swenson, MN 1094 from the University of Minnesota, and Riparia x St. Croix #5 and DM 8521-1 from David Macgregor. His “quality parents” have come from an even wider range of breeding programs including Elmer Swenson, the University of Minnesota, and Wisconsin breeder, Mark Hart, in the U.S. He also has relationships with the German Federal Research Institute-Geweilerhof, Germany, UC-Davis, Cornell University, and private grape breeders in Denmark, China, and Russia. All have been generous in providing Tom with pollen of valuable and often rare wine grape varieties to use as quality parents. Among the native species used in Tom's recent crosses are Vitis palmata and vitis cinerea to introduce the trait of very slow spring growth. He has used Vitis amurensis from the Changbai Mountain area (Jilin Province) of northeastern China as a hardy pollen parent that is more neutral in flavor and has a larger cluster than Vitis riparia.
Until 2011, Tom worked as a staff scientist at the corporate laboratory of Honeywell International, Inc.. Since retiring from Honeywell in December, 2011, he has had much more time to devote to his grape breeding endeavors, which he continues to support with his own time, resources, and personal enthusiasm.
Click here for a timeline and history of Tom's grape breeding work