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Wine honors for SOU's Greg Jones reach worldwide Greg Jones is shown in his Confraria regalia after he was honored by the Portugese wine industry. Photo courtesy of Greg Jones Thursday Dec 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM Dec 8, 2016 at 1:55 PM By MJ Daspit for the Tidings In recognition of his viticultural research, Southern Oregon University’s Professor Gregory V. Jones has received two new wine industry honors to add to his résumé. The Confraria do Vinho do Porto in Portugal, an association of professionals involved in the commerce and promotion of Port wine, welcomed Jones into its ranks at a recent induction ceremony in Seattle. Jones becomes the first Oregonian, 10th U.S. citizen and one of only 170 people worldwide to be honored with the Confraria rank of Infanção. The Confraria was established in 1982 to promote the worldwide reputation of Port wine. There are three ranks in the organization: Cancelário (Rector), Infanção (Nobleman) and Cavaleiro (Knight). Cancelário rank is conferred primarily on major Port producers but the ranks also include the president of Portugal and the king of Spain. Infanção denotes a person of outstanding reputation in the wine industry who has made significant contributions to the promotion and prestige of Port. Cavaleiros are typically highly dedicated Port dealers and distributors. If Port or Portuguese varietals aren’t on your wine radar, here’s a quick run-down: Wine grapes have been cultivated in Portugal since about 500 BC. In an area roughly equivalent to Oregon west of the Cascade Mountains, Portugal grows about 350 varieties of indigenous wine grapes and ranks eighth in the world’s wine-producing countries in terms of land area devoted to vineyards. Port is a fortified wine that originated in Portugal’s Douro Valley. One would think the Portuguese must have wine production down pat by now, but for the past several years, Jones has worked with Portuguese producers, research institutions and the government to analyze and describe the country’s grape-growing conditions as a way of defining the terroir of its distinct wine regions. Jones originally went to work in Portugal in 2010 under the sponsorship of a private agency known as ADVID, a growers’ group representing about 20,000 wine producers in the Douro Valley. ADVID functions much like a university extension office in the United States, promoting agricultural enterprises and research. Jones spent an academic year on sabbatical, living and working just outside the city of Régua on a small farm dating from the 1640s. He lived in a little cottage and either walked, rode a bike or got a ride with somebody each day to his office across the Douro River. “What they hired me to do,” Jones said in an interview, “was to look at their terroir differently, using data on climate within the landscape, soil, wine production and quality — all kinds of factors around the production and marketing of wine. But I think there was kind of a hidden reason to bring me on, because in Europe competition between universities is very intense, so universities don’t tend to collaborate quite as openly as they do here. I was bridging the gap between an industry organization (ADVID) and the universities and the government. It worked out well.” Indeed it did. Following his original research Jones returned to Portugal to produce a number of additional studies on the Douro region. Published both in scholarly and popular journals, his papers did much to increase the reputation and popularity of the region’s wines, hence his nomination to the Confraria. “I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to be doing the kind of things they needed," Jones said, "and it was a great opportunity to spend time in Portugal.” Jones is currently producing a full climatology of all the Portuguese wine regions, including the Azores and the Madeira Islands. In addition to induction into the Confraria, Jones recently made Wine Business Monthly’s list of the Top 50 Wine Industry Leaders in the U.S. for 2016. The Top 50 list appears in the December edition of the magazine that just hit the newsstands. Introductory remarks accompanying the list read, in part: “Some of the leaders on this list have discovered new ways of doing things: inventing new ways of marketing, tapping into trends and building brands, and sometimes defining what it means to be an entrepreneur in the wine industry. Others have developed a specific expertise, have found niches, or rallied behind causes they believed in. Some of the influential people on this list are known to virtually anyone who follows the wine industry while others are influential, yet fly ‘under the radar.’ All of them are leaders in the North American wine business.” The citation on Jones in the magazine recognizes him for “teaching the wine industry about climate . . . and its effects on growing wine grapes.” In the interest of accuracy, the word “world” should be inserted before “wine.” — Ashland freelance writer MJ Daspit is co-author of "Rogue Valley Wine."