  The diffractive photoproduction of vector mesons is usually described
considering the two-gluon (Pomeron) exchange, non-diagonal parton distributions
and the contribution of the real part to the cross section. In this letter we
analyze the diffractive photoproduction of the $\Upsilon$ at HERA using an
alternative model, the Color Evaporation Model (CEM), where the cross section
is simply determined by the boson-gluon cross section and an assumption for the
production of the colorless state. We verify that, similarly to the $J/\Psi$
case, the HERA data for this process can be well described by the CEM.
Moreover, we propose the analyzes of the ratio $R = \sigma_{\Upsilon} /
\sigma_{J/\Psi}$ to discriminate between the distinct approaches.
