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WINEMAKING funded competitive grants organization, dispenses in total for enology research per year, which is why Mills' lab is supported by the dairy industry. Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees with Boulton's numbers. No one claims he cooks his books, but many do argue that he's very selective—that the only kind of research he counts is the kind of research he and UC Davis want to do. In fact, the argument goes, the industry—especially the bigger players—have given tens of millions of dollars in support of research. Boulton's numbers about grants don't count, for example, the millions that went into the Robert Mondavi Institute on the Davis campus, or the new Davis winery, or chairs at various institutions endowed with in- dustry money, or vineyard land that has been given to or upgraded for various universities. How can those things not be seen as re- search contributions? Clearly these expenditures make research possible and should be applauded. It's worth noting that most of these gifts came from individuals, not from any industry-wide organization. More importantly, in a kind of scientific catch-22, investments in in- frastructure only pay off fully when they are put to work, when someone pops for the research that makes use of them. The Davis winery is a case in (sore) point; right now, it has amazing facili- ties, unparalleled ability to monitor every aspect of fermentations, state-of-the-art everything—and very little money for conducting research beyond routine grad student projects. What if European nations had pumped $10 billion into the Large Hadron Collider, but neglected to spend the money to turn it on and get all those protons colliding? No Higgs boson. Competitive grant money isn't the only factor in conducting re- search, nor the only one that matters. But matter it does, and if Boulton is right that in this category the U.S. is on another planet from the rest of the world, there remains something important to be explored. Matters of attitude The starting point for these discussions is often the fact that farm- ing and farmers tend to be conservative, prone to doing things the way they've been doing things. Glenn McGourty's first observa- tion was that the wine industry "is happy with 800-year-old grape varieties and is still trying to perfect them." And it's true that small farmers, like most small business operators, don't get up in the morning looking for radical change. A variation on this theme is the desire for immediate results and a lack of patience in waiting for long-term research to pay off. Grow- ers and wineries want to fix problems for this harvest, not for a decade down the road or for the next generation. In that same short run, wineries have to figure out how to sell their wares, making an investment in marketing more attractive than contributions to research. The payoff from better supermarket shelf position is obvi- ous. The payoff from DNA sequencing? Not so much. All of these attitudes may well be rampant in the U.S. wine in- dustry, but it's hard to see how they distinguish it from other coun- tries or other industries. Are U.S. wine folk really more conserva- tive than their Sicilian counterparts, or than peanut farmers in Georgia? More focused on immediate needs than the Argentines or the South Africans, or the stone fruit growers? More worried about how to sell their output than the vignerons of Languedoc, or row crop farmers in the Salinas Valley? What's different in these pairings is not attitude but something else. In most wine-producing nations and most ag industries, re- search happens (sometimes lots of research) and higher rates of in- novation and adoption of innovation than in the U.S. wine world. A DIVISION OF MOECKLY ENTERPRISES, INC. ™ FILTRATION & SEPARATION Compared to other winemaking countries, the United States contrib- utes little financially to research of importance to the industry. Something different is going on in other places—likely something different in the organization of the research effort, or the organi- zation of the industry itself. How research is organized In looking at how research, or the lack of it, is organized in any given national wine industry, there are three main moving parts: the industry itself, the researchers and research institutions, and the government. For the U.S., alas, nobody comes off blameless. To begin with, the number of stateside players is effectively two, with the government keeping its distance outside of exceptional cir- cumstances. Federal and state support for both wine and winegrape research has grown especially meager in the past couple of decades, after playing a more substantial role in the 1970s. Cutbacks have come in student assistance, support for agricultural extension ser- vices and basic research funding. As some of my informants ob- VintnersSupply_Immer_Dir11.qxd 11/19/10 1:41 PM Page 1 • Reliable depth filter sheets ◆ for successful filtration ◆ from pre-clarification ◆ to bottling VINTNERS SUPPLY COMPANY P.O. Box 153, St. Helena, CA 94574 Toll Free 800.366.6809 • Fax 707.584.7955 www.vintnerssupply.com WINES & VINES SEPTEMBER 2012 67