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Tucked away in an obscure, windowless office in southeastern Washington's dry, rolling vineyards, there's a coveted map that is the blueprint for the past, present, and future of the $3 billion Washington wine industry.

The map identifies what varieties are planted where in the state's "foundation-block" vineyards, where all the certified clean plants for Washington State's 125 wine varieties originate and are carefully protected with regular tending, testing, and monitoring.

The map is kept highly confidential-literally locked up-so that these state-certified varieties cannot be stolen or compromised.

Only two men have access. Markus Keller, a Swiss-born scientist who oversees the viticulture program at Washington State University's Prosser research center, and Gary Ballard, a wine industry jack-of-all-trades who left the private sector for a job managing the state's foundation-block vineyards.

"The map's something not to be given to anybody," says Ballard, walking slowly among the vineyards, inspecting a row of Grenache. "It only comes out here once a year when it's time to cut wood."

"Cutting wood" is Ballard's vernacular for the annual ritual of trimming 18-inch branches from these grapevines for distribution to the state's certified nurseries. The nurseries then propagate them, creating what's known as the "motherblock" of clean plant varieties, from which plants are then sold to growers and wineries.

The map-or rather, the vines and wines it represents-is the Washington wine industry's life insurance, health plan, retirement, and 401K all rolled into one.

It is where the industry will turn in case of a major disease outbreak. It is the historical record of the state's existing varieties. It is an investment in the future-through new varieties that are being tested, cleaned, and approved for distribution to the state's nurseries, growers, wineries, and eventually your dinner table.

It all starts here, in WSU Prosser's tissue culture labs, greenhouses, and foundation-block vineyards. Unless, of course, you are an upstart winery owner smuggling Sangiovese varieties from Italy to eastern Washington in your cowboy boot. Or a friend of a friend who just returned from Burgundy with a few French "sticks" in your suitcase. Or a shady entrepreneur offering to weave the hottest new varieties of vines into decorative baskets and wreaths in order to pass customs in Seattle.

Sound far-fetched? We won't name names, but it has happened here. And it is among the reasons why new diseases, pests, and viruses are posing an ever-greater threat to one of Washington's most promising new industries.

"You get a winemaker who really, really wants a certain variety because it's a hot market, and that puts pressure on the grower," explains Sara Spayd, until recently a food scientist and enologist at Prosser. She is now a viticulturist at North Carolina State University. "For awhile, we lost control of plant materials because we didn't have enough of the right thing during the time of the major industry expansion. When demand exploded, material came in, in suitcases, wreaths, or however else."

Now, nearly a decade later, vineyard acreage has exploded from 11,000 to more than 30,000 acres, and the greed accompanying the boom is reaping what it sowed-illegal "dirty plants" spreading debilitating vineyard diseases like leaf roll and crown gall bacterium.

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