UC Davis: From University Farm to Wine Capital

The University of California, Davis began as an embarrassment. In the early nineteen hundreds, the University of California sat in Berkeley, staffed by professors who had never milked a cow or planted a field, and the state's powerful agricultural lobby was furious. California's farmers wanted a practical farm school, not a liberal arts institution with a botany course grafted on. In nineteen oh five the California Legislature created what they called the University Farm, purchasing land near the small Yolo County town of Davisville in nineteen oh six. The first crops were planted the following year on what students would eventually nickname the Aggies' campus.

For decades it was exactly what it was advertised as: a school for learning to grow things. The School of Veterinary Medicine arrived in nineteen forty-eight, the College of Letters and Science in nineteen fifty-one, and in nineteen fifty-nine the Regents finally elevated Davis to a full general campus of the University of California. By then it was already becoming a powerhouse in the sciences no textbook could have predicted would emerge from a cow pasture.

The wine industry transformation is the most consequential story. The California Legislature had originally mandated a viticulture and enology program at the University's Berkeley campus back in eighteen eighty, but Prohibition shut it in nineteen nineteen. When Repeal came in nineteen thirty-three, the program reopened at Davis. Professors Maynard Amerine and Harold Olmo spent decades rewriting the science of winemaking. Amerine developed the climate-zone classification system that guided where California's best wine grapes should be planted. Olmo bred dozens of new grape varieties. Their students fanned out across Napa, Sonoma, and beyond. Robert Mondavi, who funded the campus's flagship wine research institute with a twenty-five-million-dollar gift in two thousand one, once said that without Davis, California wine would not exist as the world knows it.

Today the campus enrolls nearly forty thousand students and runs two research vineyards, a pilot winery, and the largest veterinary medicine school in the United States. Still, in some ways, the most productive farm in California.