Students Get Wine Research Grants

Students Get Wine Research Grants. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

WSU students have recently had some good luck when it comes to getting grants for the purpose of wine research. Brian Clark with WSU explains.

CLARK: Basically this organization, the Rhone Rangers, they’re an advocacy group for Rhone grape varieties. The Rhone River Valley of France is one of the great wine growing regions of the world and a number of the varieties do quite well in the United States. And so students who can do research projects can win scholarships from this organization.

4 students recently received grants.

CLARK: And they’re working on everything from viticultural stuff, drought resistance, the bio-physics of how water moves through grape plants to controlling grapevine vigor and then kind of a really interesting one this gal Kathy Nicholson is working on clones within varieties.

These students are all graduate students, master or PhD students at several of WSU’s campuses.

CLARK: I think a lot of what we do at WSU focuses on teasing out the best practices so that growers can optimize the yield and use as few inputs as possible in order to get that optimal yield and maximum in this case, grape quality.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.