The Australian Wine Research Institute

Evaluating and enabling adoption of new technologies

Project summary

When new additives or equipment are released to market there are risks to early adopters. As a consequence, potentially valuable technological developments can be neglected by wine producers until the efficacy of the technology is proven beyond reasonable doubt. The adoption of cross-flow filtration, a technology which can dramatically reduce processing costs, but which is only now being widely adopted by wine producers more than ten years after it first became available, might have been expedited by the generation of robust, pre-competitive performance information for use by the entire industry. Another recent example is that of CMC (an additive to render wine cold stable), approved for use in Australian winemaking in 2011 and which has generated much interest from wine producers, but with limited uptake to date due to the lack of rigorous Australian evaluation of its performance. This project will reduce the risk of adoption of new technologies, by assessing them as they become available and providing rapid impartial feedback and advice to the wine industry, resulting in rapid uptake of technologies which prove valuable. Specific areas of initial interest include trials on CMC and tannin additives.