10/07/08 Making Better Wines

Making Better Wines. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. WSU has recently opened a new research winery that hopes to answer some of the questions winemakers have. Kerry Ringer, WSU winemaker says they have now installed all of the equipment and are getting experiments ready. RINGER: Everything is installed. We've started out first round of winemaking last week and this week I think we're getting in some merlot. So we have over 70 stainless steel tanks and they're small capacity tanks so we can do all of our wines in triplicate or even in replicates of 4 for research purposes. Wine making is ages old and even though it would seem there is nothing new to know about turning grapes into wine Ringer says there is a lot more to learn. RINGER: Well that's true. I think a lot of people know how to make it pretty well but there are still issues and certainly things that we don't fully understand that this research will help with. The 500-thousand-dollar research winery is located at the WSU Agriculture Research Center in Prosser and will use university-grown grapes as well as grapes from cooperating vineyards. Both Ringer and partner James Harbertson are looking at different ideas. RINGER: A lot of people look at grape quality at the end of the season under a certain condition in the field but then they are not able to take that into the winery setting to see if it actually has any impact on the resulting wine. So there's one aspect where I think that particularly in Washington we don't know how a lot of those viticulture techniques really do affect result wines. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.