Today, the AWRI celebrates its 55th anniversary. We are very proud of what the Australian wine industry has achieved over this time. Since 1955, we’ve supported grape and wine producers through our very early work on fortified wines, malolactic bacteria and sulfur – to our work on flavour, proteins, oxygen and yeast development – through to the ground breaking work on closures, and our more recent ‘world-firsts’ of genetic sequencing of a wine yeast and the discovery of the ‘pepper’ compound in wine. None of this would have been possible without the invaluable support of grape and wine producers, our collaborators and stakeholders, nor without the dedication and skill of our employees both past and present. The future of grape and wine research is heading into a realm inconceivable to this industry’s early leaders. As we embrace spectral technologies and systems biology and use computer modeling to turbo-boost our research, one thing is for certain: future outcomes will be as impactful as they are startling in continued support of this industry. We hope you will join with us in celebrating our milestone by raising a glass of exceptional Australian wine.
