For the last twenty years, Tom Rice has led a double life. As an energetic yet mild-mannered professor of soil science at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Dr. Rice has supervised over 50 senior projects and Masters of Science theses. Most of these detail the soils and environment of the San Luis Obispo environs, including soil maps of well known vineyards in both the eastern and western regions of the Paso Robles AVA. The soil science program at Cal Poly, which Dr. Rice helped develop during his ten years as chairman, consistently attracts the largest soil science undergraduate student enrollment in the United States.

In his other life, Dr. Rice works as a private consultant and adventurer, braving cultural unrest to speak in Xi’an, the People’s Republic of China about watershed management; clambering through hot, rattlesnake-infested hills to study the viability of planting vineyards over the oil fields of Texas, escorting scientists through the Mojave Desert, and researching the insidious incursion of mercury contamination in the Lake Nacimiento basin of coastal California. In September 1998, Dr. Rice presented a talk at the University of Florence, Italy, on “Vineyards on Limestone Soils in California and France.”

“It was not a terribly auspicious beginning for a world class wine country. For brevity’s sake, we’ll only go back 20 million years. The Tertiary Period was when much of our Paso Robles area landmass was forming. There followed a number of epochs; the Pliocene era (2 to 5 million years ago) was the primary California Coastal Ranges mountain-building era, which continues today. The San Andreas Fault was fracturing during the Miocene era (5 to 24 million years ago) and it has been a real inconvenience ever since.”

Paso Robles: An American Terroir, by Tracy Cervellone and Thomas J. Rice is scheduled for publication in late 2007. Tracy Cervellone is a Certified Wine Educator, and Dr. Rice is a Certified Professional Soil Scientist. Dr. Rice agreed to meet with [me] for an interview regarding their forthcoming book, and his passion for Paso Robles soils and wines.