Podcast Episode 30: The Science of Tough Conversations with Monica Cooper & Malcolm Hobbs & Glass with a Grower: Scott Becker

In this episode of Grown in Napa Valley, host Caleb Mosley sits down with Dr. Monica Cooper and Dr. Malcolm Hobbs of the UC Cooperative Extension Napa County office for a wide-ranging conversation about how science gets translated into action in the vineyard. Monica, who has served as Napa's viticulture advisor since 2009, traces her research path from biocontrol and insect vectors of leafroll disease through to red blotch, which has become one of her primary focuses. Malcolm, who got his start counting ants in the vineyard part time, brings a social science lens to a field that doesn't always think in those terms. Together, they unpack a deceptively hard problem: how do you get neighboring growers to coordinate on a disease like red blotch, when that means having a sensitive conversation with someone you may have never met, or may have had a disagreement with in the past?

That question led Monica and Malcolm to study communication networks across the county and to explore the concept of neighborhood groups, voluntary, small-scale organizations where growers in close proximity can build the trust needed to actually work together on regional disease management. They talk through what makes those groups work, what gets in the way, and why spreading a new farming practice through a community looks a lot like any other kind of social change.
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For Glass with a Grower, Scott Becker of Realm Cellars arrives with two bottles that tell fifty years of Napa history in a single sitting: the newly released 2024 Moon Racer from the Stags Leap District, and a 1974 Cakebread Cellars Cabernet, the winery's first-ever Cabernet bottling, sourced from the same district and pulled from a Silicon Valley cellar where it had been stored impeccably for decades. The conversation moves fluidly between the wines, touching on mentorship, the pioneering names of Napa's early era, and Realm's philosophy of stewarding vineyard legacies — keeping the names, the histories, and the intention of the people who came before. 

Episode Highlights: 

• "How do you approach your neighbor to collaborate and coordinate practices? How do you have that conversation? That's very sensitive." - Dr. Monica Cooper
  
• "If you're making wine in Napa Valley today, you're standing on the shoulders of somebody else." - Scott Becker
  
• "How do I empower information to really move through our community? It doesn't have to come from me directly. In fact, if it doesn't come from me directly, that's more efficient overall." - Dr. Malcolm Hobbs
  
• "That name is now bigger than them. It's bigger than me. And so our job is to sort of steward that." - Scott Becker 
• "You wouldn't not manage for powdery mildew, because it's the norm of farming. What we need to do is get red blotch to that same place, normal farming." - Dr. Monica Cooper