Our Mission and Aims
Specific aims of the Centre are to:
- Make grapevines more robust
- Better understand, detect and control disease, spoilage and taint agents
- Define the uniquely ‘Australian’ flavour proposition and methods to attain it
- Innovate winemaking by adapting and/or developing new technologies and practices
- Provide research training excellence for higher degree by research students and postdoctoral researchers
- Pursue commercialisation and/or adoption of project outputs
Outcomes from research within the Centre will build Australia’s competitive edge, by sustainably boosting the wine industry’s profitability and resilience to challenges, while providing excellent research training and greater innovation capacity.
The ARC Training Centre for Innovative Wine Production was originally funded in 2013 for a three year term. The first Centre’s key objectives were to better manage flavour and alcohol content in Australian wines. Information relating to the first Centre can be found on the History 2014-2017 page.
Research projects within this new Centre span the winemaking process investigating aspects of viticultural management, oenology including wine microbiology, wine chemistry and sensory science and winery process optimisation. Our projects fall into two broad themes; Responding to Challenges and Increasing Profitability
Our team is located across two nodes: one centred at The University of Adelaide’s Waite campus, which forms part of the Wine Innovation Cluster, and the second at the National Wine and Grape Industry Centre at Charles Sturt University.
Our research students and postdoctoral researchers will also spend up to a third of their time located with the Centre’s industry partners.
Responding to challenges
Climate extremes
Our projects will make vines more robust by developing strategies to meet quality and yield targets despite the environmental challenges imposed by extreme weather, earlier grape harvest dates, vintage compression, drought and high salinity soils.
Pests, diseases & spoilage
Our projects will better understand, detect and control disease, spoilage and taint agents by developing innovative measurement and sensor systems for the rapid detection and quantitation of vine pathogens, wine spoilage microbes and taints from these as well as well as bushfire smoke. Novel management practices to limit their impact on grape and wine quality will be devised.
Increasing profitability
Sought-after, distinct wines
Our projects will define the uniquely ‘Australian’ wine flavour and production methods required to achieve it by identifying the nature and origin of distinctive attributes of our wines and developing vineyard and winery practices to achieve these, especially in difficult vintages.
More efficient processes
Our projects will innovate winemaking by adapting or developing new technologies and practices to preserve wine quality, improve process efficiencies in the vineyard and winery, reduce waste and costs, and drive profitability.
Support
The ARC Training Centre for Innovative Wine Production is funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Industrial Transformation Research Program (project number IC170100008).
The Centre, administered by the University of Adelaide, has been made possible through $4.4 million in competitive funding from the ARC, with an additional $11.6 million in cash and in-kind support from our research and industry partners.
We acknowledge and thank the ARC and all of our research and industry partners for their generous support.
