11/05/07 New Wine Testing Facility

New Wine Testing Facility. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Long before the bottles appear on the shelf, wine goes through numerous processes including testing for quality. For the growing Idaho wine industry that has come at a cost. Both time and money as samples had to be sent out for testing. According to Drew Dalgetty, manager of the University of Idaho's Food Technology Center, it was time to get into the business. DALGETTY: Last year the need seemed to intensify a little bit with more wineries popping up and the wine commission came to me again and I went to them and wrote a full proposal this time and said okay, if you're give the tech center a little bit of seed money so that we can buy some of this equipment then we'll go ahead and we'll start doing some testing. Now testing can be done in Caldwell where they start with pre-harvest or pre-fermentation work instead of sending the samples to labs in California. DALGETTY: I think their objective overall was to have somewhere locally that they could have some of their wines tested with the ultimate goal of improving the overall quality of wine being made in Idaho. Dalgetty says there are a very few wineries that have their own in-house testing but now they are in business. DALGETTY: The wine commission went ahead and accepted our proposal and earlier this fall purchased some of the testing equipment that we needed and now we're testing some local wines. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.