Vineyards on the lookout for European Grapevine Moth

Central Coast agricultural officials are on the lookout for the European Grapevine Moth, capable of doing serious damage to local vineyards. The insects were first detected last September in the Napa Valley. So far, they haven't been spotted in the Central Coast area, but crews are out setting traps for the pest.

We went along with agricultural technicians from San Luis Obispo County to the Laetitia Vineyards in Arroyo Grande Wednesday morning as they put up traps in parts of the vineyard.

Nancy David, one of the agricultural technicians who was setting out the traps today said, "It's a very simple little trap. It's full of sticky stuff in the middle. Here we will bait it with a non toxic pheromone trap and what this will do is attract the male moths to come in and they'll be checked every two weeks."

One trap is set up for every twenty acres, placed so as the flight paths of the moths will come straight down into the vineyards. A trap is tied to the beginning of a vine post where the moths will enter the trap and get caught into the sticky pheromone bait inside.

Obviously, local vineyards hope that no moths will turn up here, but between now and the end of June, the traps will be checked regularly for the moth. Lino Bozzano, Director of vineyard operations at Laetitia Vineyards says, "We're always concerned about new pest outbreaks, anything that can cause damage to the grapevine, things that we don't know how to control yet and what the ultimate impact is."

For now, it's a waiting game, as local vineyards spend extra time closely monitoring their vines. They don't want to see what happened to one vineyard up in Napa County last fall, where the entire grape crop was wiped out by the moth. That led to quarantines in that area of the state.

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