When Alexandra Leite arrived on the UC Davis campus as a viticulture and enology major last year, it was a bit intimidating navigating her new world. 

But when she was teamed up with an upper-division mentor through the Davis Enology and Viticulture Organization, or DEVO, all the possibilities of the major opened up as she met other students and attended events.

This year she is the student club’s Under 21 representative and in charge of matching new students and mentors.

“One of the bigger things is getting people connected into the program,” Leite said. “I remember, personally, that was how I started to get more interested.”

DEVO, founded in 1974, is a rare student club and nonprofit that supports events and activities to foster student connections with each other, the industry and the community they may join after graduation.  

The members oversee a vineyard, teach a first-year Spring seminar class, offer weekly wine tastings, support a home winemaking effort, and plan immersion trips locally and internationally.

They also host and run the annual Winkler Dinner, a six-course meal with wine pairings featuring silent and live auctions, that brings in tens of thousands of dollars annually to fund club activities. 

“It’s a good experience for students to get in touch with the wine industry,” club president and master’s student Sydney Rogers said. “It gives students insight into what it would be like to work in those areas.”

Building connections

Ben Montpetit, chair of the Department of Viticulture and Enology, said DEVO supports students and the department through enrichment events that can lead to long-term relationships with industry and alumni.

“This network tends to be extremely powerful in helping facilitate their success after they leave Davis,” he said. “It’s bringing our students together. It’s enriching their experiences. It’s building community and networks.” 

DEVO has about 50 members and a dozen or so officers who manage trip logistics, the club vineyard in south Davis, the winetasting group Vitis, the Winkler dinner and other activities. For students under 21, the group organizes activities like grape crushes and olive oil tastings while working with vineyards to ensure those students can tour and learn about winemaking while not participating in tastings. Most of the events are free. 

“We cover as much as we can that’s feasible for us to do based on how much we raised at Winkler,” Rogers said. 

Summer internships, save for plane tickets, are included and recent scholarship recipients have been to France and Spain. “That gives students an opportunity to travel somewhere that would otherwise be inaccessible to them for financial or logistically complicated reasons,” Rogers said. 

A trip and then an idea

The Winkler dinner came to be after viticulture and enology students organized a student immersion trip to France in 2003 for more than a dozen students. Over the nearly two-week trip, the students went to Bordeaux, Burgundy and the south of France, visiting wineries and meeting with winemakers, said Jessica Koga, the winemaker at Schramsberg Winery who was on that initial trip.

“We were being invited into places where they don’t typically invite you,” she said. “It was definitely a unique experience.”

When the students returned, some graduate students with hospitality experience came up with the idea of a dinner to fund future trips. “The Winkler dinner was supposed to create a source of funding that would be ongoing and significant,” Koga said. “It was a more sustainable way of creating a budget for the club to fund some travel for future immersion trips, whether that was local or international.”  

The first Winkler Dinner was held out at the teaching vineyard under the Winkler vine, named for Alber J. Winkler who chaired the department from 1935 to 1957. The vine had grown up to about 6 feet and was spread out over a grid. “The grapes would hang down at sort of head level, easy to pick,” Koga said.  

Back then and today, club members handle all aspects of the dinner from logistics and set up to serving and securing auction items from alumni, vineyards and others. 

“I think a lot of people are really supportive of the fact that we need the next generation to come and be a part of the industry,” Rogers said. “It’s incredible that we have that support and the generosity of wineries donating. We couldn’t do it without alumni being so supportive.” 

Connections that last

For Koga and others, the DEVO bonds are lifelong, and more than half of her team at Schramsberg are Davis alumni. She recently returned to campus to conduct a tasting of sparkling wines for Vitis, a winetasting event run by the club and named after the vine that grows grapes. 

Vitis events, which are hosted by students, winemakers and others, provide a chance to learn more about the craft and its products. 

“It’s pretty cool because people get access to wines they would not have access to and learn new styles and varieties,” said Mirjam Fischer, a graduate student and Vitis chair. 

Fischer conducted a tasting of wines from her native Germany and another student did the same, featuring wines from his home country of China. The weekly tastings, which are 21 and over, typically cost $15 but the department began funding these costs through the generosity of alumni donors this year as an enrichment event because students were deciding between tastings and other student expenses, Montpetit said. 

“Through the act of tasting and talking about the wines, they’re building their palate,” he said. “If they’re thinking about making wine in the future, they will have something to reference. As such, it was critical that we made this learning opportunity available to all our students by removing the cost barrier.” 

The Winkler Dinner will be held at 5:30 p.m. May 24 in the teaching and research winery at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science. Tickets go on sale March 24