Rose is a photographer who studied with Ansel Adams in the 1970s and played paparazzi to Hollywood stars (and Adams himself) for the Los Angeles Times. He worked a quarter century in winery public relations for Fetzer, Allied Domecq, Kendall-Jackson and J Vineyards — always with camera in tow — and now travels throughout California with a camera and smartphone from his home base in Solvang, in Santa Barbara County wine country.
This winter’s wild weather in California has kept me dialed in on Rose’s feed, for photos of snowfall in Lake Tahoe, blizzards in the Santa Ynez Valley, and rain in Death Valley. Some of those may eventually feature in his current project, a photo exploration of California’s relationship with water through drought, wildfires and, now, atmospheric rivers.
I reached out to Rose after he announced earlier this year that he had donated some 140,000 digital images he has photographed to the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, where they will be available to historians and researchers interested in how the landscape of American culture and viticulture evolved throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. About half those images relate to wine. I wanted to hear his personal perspective on how California wine had changed during his career, and how he viewed this change through his camera lens. We spoke over Zoom.
“I’m a terroir guy,” Rose told me right off the bat, as any self-respecting wine shutterbug should be. “I’m all about where the grapes are grown.” His interest in photographic terroir was sparked in the early 1990s, when he accompanied Los Angeles Times wine writer Dan Berger on winery visits.
“George was the most inquisitive of all the photographers I worked with,” Berger recalls. “He was always wandering into places where I couldn’t imagine he would get much of anything, and he always came out with something creative.”
That creativity led to a photo book called “The Art of Terroir” and a few limited-edition coffee table books for Sonoma and Mendocino county wine regions, as well as steady work doing promotional calendars for wineries. He has also done work in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and British Columbia’s Okanagan wine region.
Climate features prominently in all these projects.
“The climate in California and elsewhere is intensifying,” Rose said. “The heat waves are hotter and longer, and this year is turning out to be a crazy year with the rainfall. It ended the drought in three weeks, and was ripe for photography.”
His years in winery public relations have left Rose worried that consumers have lost — or never really made — the connection between wine and the vineyard.
“Wineries have always had trouble convincing consumers that wines are made with grapes that are subject to climate and weather,” he said. “Social media was supposed to help us sell wine. We have images of people clinking glasses, but we’ve gotten away from showing how the wine is made.” Vineyards give Rose special inspiration.
“Walking the vineyards, I can tell whether the vines are healthy or not. And viticulture has changed tremendously, especially with the move to sustainability,” he told me. “Practices such as reducing drip irrigation, finding the right grape varieties for the soils — there’s a more heads-up approach to grape-growing than when I started in the business.”
Improved viticulture and the emphasis on stability has helped California’s vineyards through some intense weather in recent vintages.
“These few years have been excruciating,” Rose said, citing the last three years of severe drought. “Now the drought is over, at least until the next one begins, which could be next week. But the good news is, the vineyard ponds are full. And perhaps surprisingly, through it all the vines seem to be just fine. And that’s the beauty of grapes. You don’t have to do anything. Whether it’s dry or whether it’s wet, there’s going to be a 2023 harvest. It’s going to happen just like it did in all the previous years.”
And just as in every California grape harvest for more than three decades, George Rose will be there to photograph it.
