Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/80303
WINEMAKING ture and Enology is the manager of industry relations, which surely need some managing. From another angle, I asked several people why, if Davis smugness is such a problem, the industry hasn't just funded the bejeepers out of Washington State or Cal Poly or Fresno State, and never got a thoroughly convincing answer. And as to the charge that Davis research and university re- search in general are expensive? True enough. Good research costs a lot of money. Industry structure This brings us to the third set of players in the research fund- ing game, the members of the wine industry, also known as the folks who have the money. The U.S. wine industry is strongly bifurcated, with a handful of enormous label conglomerates accounting for maybe three-quarters of sales and thousands of comparatively tiny operations, with a thin layer of medium- sized, independent companies in between. Not everybody has the same interests in research. The small folks, even the ones who are crazy about the value of research, don't have enough money to be game-changers. If enough of them band together, however—as with the self-assess- ment program in Oregon, which funds some research through the Oregon Wine Board—they can have a collective impact. Califor- nia has taken a couple of flings at industry-wide self-assessments aimed at least in part for wine research, but both fell apart for various internal reasons, and nobody seems to be proposing an- other attempt today. Until that happens, there is basically no way for the really little guys to enlist in the research effort, even if they want to. Small producers are also the Petri dish for another strain of anti-Davis inoculum, the argument that Davis research and Davis teaching are all about sanitation and squeaky-clean winemaking, not about the soul of wine, and searching for the soul of wine doesn't really need much research anyway, since the ancients al- ready had it figured out. This is a different kind of complaint from the one voiced by the big outfits that have no beef over winemak- ing philosophy with the academics. The major industry players make considerable use of technical information, and some have substantial in-house research divisions of their own. A lot of that research, however, might better be de- scribed as analysis. Of every tankful of wine in their vast opera- tions, of every bottle put out from a competitor, and of every snip- pet of consumer trend information, a good deal of it is concerned with how to lower costs, not how things work at the molecular level. All this is sound business practice, but it does not result in lots of patents or conceptual breakthroughs or radical alterations in industry (or even company) practice. If the goal of companies this size is maintaining and expanding market share, it's not clear they need DNA sequencing any more than the "natural" winemakers. Where's the incentive? The more people I talked to, the more my thoughts ran toward a dark place: Maybe there is no good reason, no galvanizing incen- tive, for the U.S. wine industry to invest on a large scale in fancy, cutting-edge research. These days, anybody with half a brain and a fast Internet con- nection can figure out how to make good, solid, market-quality wine. Thanks in great part to an earlier generation at Davis, ma- jor and fatal wine faults have virtually disappeared from the mar- 70 WINES & VINES SEPTEMBER 2012