When I was a lab rat at UC Davis back in the early 1980s, it was generally felt that the Australians had a slight to
significant lead in their knowledge of the technical aspects of wine production. Once I became a winemaker, this perceived gap only widened rather than closed. There's really no excuse for this.

Frankly, I am getting tired of hearing about Australian wines, winemakers and the Australian Wine Research Institute. I'm not particularly anti-Antipodal. Australia produces fine wine and fine winemakers. I don't even resent their presence, success and market share in the U.S. I'm just fed up with the attitude that they're doing something we can't. Sure "Brand Australia" has been done well, but there is nothing that the Australians have done that lies beyond the capacity of our own wine industry. As small as the U.S. wine industry is, it's still a great deal larger and better funded than the Australian wine industry. We could afford to do more if we chose to.

Regular readers of WBM have probably noticed that almost any article about closures that we've written in the past few years has cited research conducted at the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI). The reason for this is really simple: Just about the only published comprehensive research on the subject stems from a single ongoing study conducted by the AWRI. One wonders why there hasn't been a number of such studies. I don't think the Aussies were the first winemakers to wonder how various closures compare to each other. It's not like the alternatives to natural cork were invented yesterday. The roll-on screwcap was invented in 1924 and used on wine for something like 50 years. The synthetic (plastic) closures have been used on wine for at least 20 years. Heck, crown caps have been around and used in sparkling wine production since about 1892.

Does anyone seriously believe that those clever Aussies were the first winemakers to wonder how they all perform? Of course they weren't. One can assume that the closure manufacturers conduct their own research, but most of this isn't published. Even if it were, could we really trust what Brand-A's research says about the performance of Brand-B? Similarly, we can assume that the largest wine companies have the resources to conduct comprehensive studies, but historically any findings from such research only surfaces rarely.

For closure research this state of affairs formed a subtext of the "Science of Closures" seminar at the 2005 ASEV annual meeting. At the seminar, several of the academics, including the seminar moderator, Christian Butzke, decried the lack of published closure research in the U.S. and implied that the U.S. wine industry lags behind Australia in research support. Jim Peck of G-3 Enterprises protested these statements by noting that he has several closure research projects either currently on-going or slated for future work.

As I noted at the time, no one responded directly to Peck's comments at the seminar. I believe that each party missed the other's point. It was apparent that the original comments were that the closure research being conducted in the U.S. is, for the most part, conducted outside of academia in an industry setting. Although such research is sometimes submitted for peer-review and published, the research is more generally considered proprietary and protected like the trade secret it really is.

Beyond the specific case of closure research, this is the problem with private research generally. Sure, someone might be doing the research; but if you can't find out the results, what use is it to you? I should have thought that this point was self-evident. Apparently it is only self-evident to those clever Aussies.

This leads me to wonder how they got so far ahead of the U.S. There's a line in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff that goes, "You know what makes your rockets go up? Funding makes your rockets go up. No bucks, no Buck Rogers." The same can be said for wine research. You know what generates research that is relevant to the wine industry? Funding, that's what. The salary paid to a state-funded university professor by our tax dollars really funds no research whatsoever. It's not meant to. That salary is intended to keep a professor from taking a job in private industry, thus making him or her available to fulfill the research and teaching missions of the public academic institution.

There have been attempts to fill the funding gaps with endowed chairs mainly funded by corporate donors. In addition, the organizations like the American Vineyard Foundation (AVF) have been attempting to fill the gap. The AVF does do a pretty good job at setting research priorities, but it lacks the budget to fund more than a small fraction of U.S. wine and grape research. Australia, however, spends about $23 million per year for its research--with the largest portion of that total funding research performed by the AWRI. The AVF gets about $1.2 million. An additional $3.5 million or so is spent on research into Pierce's Disease. Even if we include this amount, and I would argue we should not since the PD funds can't be relied upon for the long term, we see that we're spending far less than the smaller Australian wine industry is spending. At a minimum we'd need to double the amount we're spending on research. Realistically, we really need to increase the industry funding of research ten-fold in order to expect to be able to keep our industry from becoming an anachronistic novelty.

One could say that this situation is to our benefit in that we get the fruits of the research generated by the AWRI without having to pay for it. The problem is that since we don't fund it, we do not have any say in the way the AWRI sets its priorities. Although there is a significant amount of overlap, Australia's research needs aren't our research needs. Their solutions might not be the best ones for our industry.

Academic researchers have to chase grant money. During my time at UC Davis, like many students, I worked as a lowly research assistant. I used to consider it an interesting bit of trivia that the funding for my job usually came from outside the wine industry. One particular case I remember--additional grants for funding for a project looking at the enzyme polygalacturonase, a plant enzyme that hadn't been extensively studied in grapevines--came from the Corn Board rather than from some source related to the wine industry. This, of course, meant that the corn (maize) became the primary focus of the study, with grapevines relegated to slipstreaming in as a comparison subject of what was now a corn research project.

Academics generally have to cobble together a patchwork of grants in order to fund their research. I was reminded of this once again last April when I had the chance to talk with UC Davis professor David Mills at the 2007 Brewers and Vintners Annual Scientific Symposium. During the symposium, Mills gave an interesting talk on the genomics of lactic acid bacteria (LAB). Mill's lab has sequenced the genome of a number of LAB species, including Lactobacillus brevis, Lb. bulgaricus, Lb. gasseri, Lb. casei, Leuconostoc mesenteroides, Oenococcus oeni, Lactococcus lactis ssp. cremoris, Streptococcus thermophilus, Pediococcus pentosaceus, Bifidobacterium longum and Brevibacterium linens. Only Oenococcus oeni is used in winemaking. The other species are primarily important to other industries and/or are wine spoilage organisms.

Is it really appropriate that wine and grape research has to rely upon the financial generosity of the corn and dairy boards? If the cheese and salami industries are putting up the dough, don't they set the research agenda? Isn't it time for the U.S. wine industry to step up and fund research directly relevant to the U.S. wine industry. Isn't it really time for a USWRI? wbm

Curtis Phillips, an editor for Wine Business Monthly since 2000, is a graduate of UC Davis, and has been a winemaker since 1984 and an agricultural consultant since 1979.