Harold Olmo,who died June 30 at 96, may have been the most prolific developer of new and improved grape varieties; he played a key role in the rise of California’s wine industry.

Working with cabernet sauvignon rootstock, he developed the Ruby Cabernet and Rubired varietals, among the most popular grapes used in California wines. Olmo was also credited with developing a high-yield, disease-resistant chardonnay grape, which was quickly adopted as the most widely planted wine grape in California, grown on almost 100,000 acres. In 1960, when he introduced the improved version, chardonnay was grown on only 50 acres.

Olmo’s successor as professor of viticulture and enology at the University of California, Davis, Andy Walker, said, “The whole basis of the chardonnay industry, going from being an insignificant grape to the most important variety in California, is his work.”

Olmo began breeding grapes in the mid-1930s, just as the California wine industry was reorganizing in the wake of Prohibition. He became an expert on identifying grapes in abandoned and overgrown vineyards. In the 1940s, he went prospecting for ancient cultivars in Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, where he traveled with an armed retinue and once had to have his car pulled out of a gorge by nomads using camelhair ropes. Newspapers took to calling him “the Indiana Jones of viticulture.”

In addition to his work on wine grapes, Olmo developed several new varieties of table grapes that are especially early and late ripening, thus helping to create a nearly year-round crop.

Olmo grew up in the Mission District of San Francisco, and inherited his father’s love of gardening. He sold flowers to neighborhood florists as a teenager, but his one attempt to grow grapes in the family’s backyard garden was met with failure. He earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1934, and went to work at Davis.

His prospecting trips to central Asia included one expedition to Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) possibly the place where wine was first invented. The vines he brought back yielded grapes that were made into wine by the owner of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Warren Wimarski, who speculated that it “could well have been the vine from which Noah made his wine.”

Olmo also consulted with the wine industries in Romania, South Africa, and other emerging wine exporters. In Australia, he is generally credited with opening up the Frankland area — by identifying poor drainage and nematodes that plagued the region’s agriculture. One vineyard, Frankland Estates, still produces a blend it called “Olmo’s Reward.” His consulting work extended to Afghanistan, where table grapes constitute a large percentage of the country’s legal exports. Some of the varieties being grown there today are descended from grapes Olmo collected in the 1930s and 1940s.

Husky and 6 feet tall, and often caked with mud from working in the fields on his 160-acre farm, Olmo was a much-loved and semi-mythical figure on the University of California, Davis campus, where he was mentor to several generations of viticulturists. Unsurprisingly, he was fond of wine, and generally drank it at least twice a day, with lunch and dinner, choosing bottles from the wide variety he stocked in a 4,000-bottle cellar.

Harold Paul Olmo
Born July 31, 1909, in San Francisco; died June 30 at a hospital in Davis of complications from a fall; survived by three children and several grandchildren.